Ori And My Deep Disappointment

As part of my 52 goals for 2025 one of the goals I set myself was to clear the backlog of games in my Steam account. There were 153 games unplayed at the start of the year and it now stands at 122 so 31 have been played in the last 8 days, some for a lot longer than others. I thought about writing reviews for each of the games but many of them are not remarkable, if I find anything of particular note I will make a post about them.

Ori And The Blind Forest is a game that I played many moons ago, where exactly I can't recall because according to Steam it was unplayed in my library - some posts on Reddit mentioned that it was available on the Epic Games Store but was removed so that's probably where I first played it. Regardless, for the sake of certainty I decided to play again from scratch and I was disappointed.

On the face of it Ori is a platform game, where you control a character, move around an environment and jump from platform to platform, mix in a few abilities, add a few collectibles and an incredible art style, with a dash of story and you have a recipe for a decent game. Except for one little problem, Ori isn't just a platformer.

There are a handful of games that attempt to switch genres mid-game, some do this quite well, whilst others fail miserably. Mixing genres is complex, like baking a cake you can include any flavour combination that you want but not all flavours work well together. Ori attempts to switch genres mid-game and in my opinion it falls flat in doing so.

The best example of a platform game I can give, perhaps the most thought of example is the Mario franchise, almost all Mario games are platforms to some extent. Whilst each Mario game plays around with different elements of gameplay, the core mechanic is jumping from place to place, and "falling with style" when needed - not surprising when his original name was Jump Man when he first appeared in a Donkey Kong Arcade game before getting his own franchise.

The best example of a rhythm game I can give is guitar hero, part of a wider genre of games, whilst not the first rhythm game it is most definitely the first that comes to mind when I think of the concept. A rhythm game asks the player to press buttons in a specific order at the right time - a reductionist explanation, the games themselves are often more complex but that is the basic idea.

When you mix these two genres together there are two ways you can do it, the first is to make a platformer with timed elements - this is something that Mario games use sparingly; the other way you can combine the two is by creating a rhythm game with platforms which is arguably what Sonic the Hedgehog can best be described as, the crux of the Sonic brand is speed, everything revolves around it. When you are adept at any Sonic game you just have to move at speed and jump at the right time and you'll ace the level. Some games in the Sonic franchise demand this of the player when they want to achieve perfection but crucially those challenges are secondary and not necessary to progress with the story.

Ori And The Blind Forest attempts to switch genres mid-game, it starts out as a platformer with timed elements and then mid-game switches to become a rhythm game with platforms and this is where it falls flat, and thanks to Steam Achievements I have data to back this up.

As a games developer one of the things you learn is that achievements aren't awarded to players to make them feel good, that's just what these platforms market those mechanics as, no the real reason achievements exist is because as a developer they are essentially a form of analytics that let you look at the progression of the player through your game. To put it simply, if your game has 5 chapters you stick an achievement at the end of each chapter and you can see from the achievement statistics how many players played the game and how far into it they got.

Ori switches Genre when you reach the Ginso Tree, this is where the Bash ability is introduced and the requirement of the player to parry their moves, essentially forgoing platforms entirely and switching from point to point on screen through timing - in other words it stops being a platformer, and becomes a rhythm game.

The ability to parry - to jump, hit, rebound, and rehit enemies in a potentially endless chain - is something that games like Cuphead incorporate heavily. There are other games that include this mechanic but in addition to the core gameplay - the most obvious example being the Metroid franchise.

It's worth noting at this point that Ori also falls into the Metroidvania genre of gaming, coined for the portmanteau of Metroid + Castlevania which served as the principle games in the genre, the character explores and extensive environment that expands as they progress, with gated areas requiring abilities the player later unlocks allowing them to go back and explore old areas once more.

Where Ori fails and Metroid succeeds, is that the introduction of these abilities is in addition to existing gameplay, it compliments the existing abilities but doesn't replace them. The Ginso Tree escape sequence in Ori And The Blind Forest can't be skipped and requires the player to parry from start to finish almost entirely. So I was curious how many players struggled with this, again some cursory exploration of Reddit showed quite a few threads of players complaining about this element of the game, and digging a little deeper upon completion of the sequence the player is awarded the "Close Call" achievement - which only 40.1% of players actually achieved, meaning 59.9% of players never made it passed this point in the game. That's more than half the people who played the game never managed to pass this point, never mind finishing the game.

The sad thing is, there is a sequel, and after reaching this point of frustration I am unlikely to buy it. I love the art style, I like the story, the pace and progression of gameplay up until this point were organic. The Ginso Tree escape sequence took me about 30 attempts before I managed to complete it, that in itself annoyed me but when I progressed to the next major area of the game, the Misty Woods and realised this mechanic had all but replaced the platforming used in the game up until that point I decided to bale.

I've played rhythm games with platforms like Cuphead and managed to finish them before, there is a sense of accomplishment but you really have to be in the right mindset to actually play and die and play and die and play and die over and over again to achieve that goal and actually feel like it's worth it, and the story of Ori And The Blind Forest doesn't warrant that effort.

This was unnecessary and ruined an otherwise enjoyable game. The achievement for completing the game, "The Journey Ends" is given, and from the Steam stats only 26.9% of players actually managed to unlock that which feels sad, imagine writing a book and being told most people abandon it a quarter of the way through and never finish it.