Ori and the Blind Forest – My Ex-Girlfriend the Video Game

Ori and the Blind Forest is not fun. It is filled with imaginative and excellent puzzles and level design, but looking back all I can remember is frustration and anger. But despite me never wanting to return to that world ever again, there remains a longing of that journey, and a lingering desire to just launch the game to listen to that calming and wonderful title theme. 

The game’s visual cues (or lack thereof) are probably my biggest problem with it. The backgrounds have backgrounds and despite loving the depth in the background environment, it is undeniably overly cluttered at times especially when you are trying to identify how to solve a puzzle and which rocks are safe to jump on, during a long and difficult timed platforming sequence.  Granted, failure does not set you backwards too much, and from each failure you learn how to navigate that puzzle better. But the knowledge one obtains from one puzzle does not seem to carry on to other puzzles, as new elements are being tossed at you when you enter a new area, and the Bash-and-Fly system seem to be the only one that is useful to master since it appears in almost all the future puzzles. Two of the puzzle solving skills, Light Burst and Charge Flame are neither useful in combat, nor are they ever used other than one off obstacles that require no skill or technique to pull off. The game also contains mechanics like allowing one to Bash a Light Burst to propel one upwards, but by the time I had any use for that I already have the Charge Jump, which made that technique obsolete. The game forces you to learn way too many things, that you must keep at the back of your head in case a random puzzle that requires that solve pops up. And it punishes you with backtracking and confusion when you forget. Sometimes searching for a guide on the Internet helps, sometimes it doesn’t as you spend hours running around the huge map to try and figure out what to do next.

Traversing the map would have been more enjoyable if Ori controlled better. The first problem is the dash button. You use WASD to move, and Ctrl to dash and air dash. The human hand is not designed to WASD+Ctrl. This would have been better with key rebinding, or if I could afford a controller, but with a mouse and keyboard it just feels awful. The Charge Jump, the final ability Ori obtains, has a mode that allows Ori to charge off walls. It requires the holding down of the Shift key, pressing a directional key, then pressing space – I feel that this could have been simplified because having a three button move (Or more specifically it is A, Space, Hold Shift, Hold D, Space) during a speedy platforming sequence is really not a good idea. Ori sometimes stops himself during a stomp attack for no reason, and doing a wall jump without first getting the ability to cling onto wall is a pain in the ass because the game requires an insane amount of precision to get certain portions right. And this is where the poor visual cues come back to haunt you; landing at a bad spot because you are in a rush, and you cannot see what is coming at you, kills you instantly because the game loves death traps.

It is just like when we were still together. It was not a game that I could play for hours because she pissed me off so frequently, that I would just shut it down for a while to clear my head and deal with the problems later. And every time I return to that title screen, with that song playing at the background, it just makes me want to forgive her again. Never mind the invisible death traps, never mind long platforming stages that only gave you one try or risk restarting a three minutes sequence – I’ll do better this time. You will not change, you are programmed this way, and therefore I am always the one that needs to improve and adapt to become the person you need me to be. I will do so to ensure that I can be here till your game ends. Perhaps I am curious of the ending. Or perhaps, I just loved you more than you loved me.

And you can’t be so harsh when I fail all the time. Some sections are long and gruesome without chance for breaks, and some problems exist because she wants to make my life even more miserable. There are times that I genuinely want to stop playing the game, but every time I see the title screen my heart softens and I return grudgingly to continue the journey. Sometimes I hope that she treated me better, but then again, maybe I’ll not have moved on so easily from her if that was the case. The ending was cliché, but beautiful in its own way. I’d probably forget this game a few years later, simply because our brains are tuned to cover up bad memories as we age. I’ve had enough of trying to make things work, and I think I’d want a dumb fun game like Doom for the time being. In fact, I’m going back to play Doom again.