Comments 4

Re: Review: Ori And The Blind Forest: Definitive Edition (Switch) - An Unmissable Experience

spikesagal

Probably the first review I really disagree with. It's a beautiful game, no doubt, but it riddled with bugs to such an extent, that it is barely playable (on the Switch). Minor gameplay spoilers ahead.

Going backwards, when I finally finished the game (on Normal mode), right when the egg was about to crack, in typical Microsoft fashion, the game crashed. I had to repeat the escape sequence just to witness the two seconds of cutscene that remained. And it took me about 50 more tries, because...

The game has massive input buffering issues. That is, instead of readily discarding previous inputs and acting on the current one, the game tends to ignore or delay your current input. This is very noticeable for segments where you have to use the parachute a lot. Sometimes you'll discover that the parachute isn't there and you're just plummeting to your death. Sometimes bash and ground pound just don't work, and then they might just do a few seconds later!

Ori also controls like what I can only refer to as a wet bag of cement with rocket boosters. For a game that requires this high of a level of precision with platforming, this can be frustrating.

And finally, this game teaches you how to play the hard way, by instantly killing you with a random falling object. Sure, next time you'll learn to avoid it, but that's a really bad way to teach the player what to do, and could be easily fixed by having the first rock fall right in front of you and not insta-kill you. As a result, the player winds up playing the early parts of the stage over and over only to reach the last part of the stage and discover that there were maybe two seconds of gameplay left. That's what happened to me at the last escape sequence, where both bash on the falling rocks and the parachute kept failing because of the aforementioned input buffering issues, and the one time they worked, that was the end of the game!

There are other things I dislike about the game, but all minor compared to how rage-inducing the platforming is.