Why You Should Play: Ori and the Blind Forest Definitive Edition

Welcome back to Why You Should Play where this week I'll be focusing on my GOTY for 2015: Ori and the Blind Forest.

Title: Ori and the Blind Forest
Platform: Xbox One, PC
Developer: Moon Studios

There were more than a few of my friends who scoffed at me when I was asked what my Game of the Year for 2015 was and I had proudly exclaimed Ori and the Blind Forest (which will henceforth in this article be referred to as Ori for the sake of brevity). After all it was a year filled with the likes of Halo 5, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Witcher 3, and many more fantastic games. However, this is the one title that stood out to me for that entire year and had left an indelible mark on me. Make no mistakes my friends, I put this game in the same category as the heavy hitters and for good reason: it's simply that good.

Ori is at its heart a platforming game with elements of Metroidvania style gameplay. You'll run, jump, collect things to power up, level up your abilities, and earn new abilities to access previously inaccessible areas of the map. This alone would put it into a different tier for me, as I truly love this style of game, but it's tied together with an amazing art style and a simple yet emotional story that reminded me of something I would have seen in a Miyazaki film.

The game is gorgeous and has all the charm of a Miyazaki film.

In Ori you will follow the adventures of the titular creature as he seeks to make his way to the Spirit Tree seeking to heal the world after a cataclysmic event makes the forest and the creatures within it wither and begin to die. To restore the balance Ori will platform and battle through a world of lush and rich visuals full of enemies that want to see you dead, and they most likely will. Ori can be a brutally hard game and you’ll often see the character crushed, stabbed, impaled and shot (though none of this is gruesome or blood). Luckily none of this ever becomes frustrating because of an awesome system where you can spend light you earn from doing well within the game to create a checkpoint wherever in the game you’d like. This means when you come to a grueling area that demands perfection you can attempt it as many times as you need to. Without this I believe the game would have been to frustrating for the common player, but because of it by the end of the game you have become an absolute master of Ori’s abilities, which is a good thing because you’ll need to be to finish the game.

All of the aforementioned abilities are fluid and easily executable and have a number of uses. For instance, Ori has a dash move that moves him further in the direction he is moving, if he goes through an enemy that enemy will then take damage and Ori can utilize this dash move again. This makes some areas a mad dash of jumps and dashes, blowing through enemies to reach higher areas. When watching someone do this rapidly with no errors it’s a truly impressive sight and it made Ori the first game I ever felt the urge to speed run. 

The puzzles and challenges are varied and some are brutal.

The definitive edition has been released now as well adding new small story elements and a couple of new abilities as well as allowing back travel to places previously unreachable. It also adds an easy mode for gamers who may not want the challenge, but still experience the majesty of this adventure. This further refines the game and makes it more accessible to a wider variety of gamers and gives the game even more polish. Even better if you already purchased the game previously you can buy the new edition for only $5 dollars, and if you hadn’t it costs the same as the original game.

Simply put there is no better time to experience the fantastic journey that is Ori and the Blind Forest if you haven’t already, and if you’ve already played it there is enough here to justify another dive into that world. This is without a doubt not just one of my favorite games of 2015, but my favorite games of this entire console generation and makes it into my top ten gaming experiences of all time. If you enjoy platformers, gorgeous art, and Metroidvania style gameplay then you should be playing Ori. You won’t regret it.