The Ori Games Fix Hollow Knight

Video games are a great source of entertainment: they’re fun, they’re absolutely art, and they can bring isolated people together. In this new series, Jayden Cammarata—Witherly Heights’ new game critic—reviews a few favorites, least favorites, and games in between.

By: Jayden Cammarata

This article makes reference to another game, Hollow Knight. Read my review of that game (found here) before to provide context for this article.

Soundtrack Sample: The Waters Cleansed 

Ori and the Blind Forest, the first of two games by Moon Studios, is a standard metroidvania. It takes place in the forest of Nibel, which is magically connected to the Spirit Willow. After a giant bird attacks the spirit willow and puts the entire forest in danger, Ori, a monkey-like spirit which the player controls, tries to save the forest. 

With this end goal, players can explore the world to find upgrades—for example, magic trees that let them climb walls, spirit light (experience points), and increased maximum health and energy (mana). However, there are spikes in the way, as well as laser turrets and enemies. These obstacles can all be avoided, and enemies can also be killed with Sein, a floating ball of energy that deals damage to nearby enemies with the press of a button. However,  killing enemies is not always the best course of action– one unlocked ability, Bash, lets the player launch themselves off of enemies or their projectiles, meaning they are tools necessary for platforming more often than obstacles themselves.

Ori and the Blind Forest is a well implemented metroidvania. The game has gorgeous music, incredible graphics, and good balance throughout. The combat system is basic and mostly uninteresting, but this doesn’t interfere much– significantly more focus is placed on running and exploring than on fighting. In fact, the game has no traditional boss fights; they are instead replaced by chase sequences. 

The movement system merits this attention. Ori is fast and moves fluidly, which makes it fun to control. The Bash, the game’s main innovation, supports this. The Bash makes it possible for players to launch themselves around, accelerating or reversing directions instantly, and continue speeding along. Bashes can also be chained together to stay airborne, and this is a good way to exercise mastery of the mechanics. All of this makes movement in the game engaging and fun. 

However, the speeds involved in Ori and the Blind Forest present problems. The fast controls make overshooting small platforms easy, and make precision difficult. Additionally, the screen often feels zoomed in, or as though the camera is having trouble keeping up with the character; players would actually have plenty of visibility if this were another game, but here, the gap between the character and the edge of the screen can be traversed in less time than elsewhere, so it isn’t enough. 

The game has some other problems as well. One of these is with its level system. This is particularly poorly implemented: spirit light can be earned by exploring, but it can also be earned by killing enemies; this encourages grinding, and shifts the focus of the game from platforming—where it is meant to reside—to combat. Another issue is the presence of hard mode. This difficulty adds nothing to the platforming part of the game, but makes enemies tougher to kill and makes leveling up slower. This further encourages grinding by ensuring that the experience found naturally through exploring isn’t enough; it makes grinding slower at the same time, so that this boring part of gameplay will take up more of the player’s time. The experience and difficulty systems of the game overall felt unnecessary, and like they were only created to meet audiences’ expectations of what a game should entail.

The save system also takes away from the Ori and the Blind Forest. At any point, if the player is safe and on the ground, they can spend energy to create a Soul Link to respawn from. This is an interesting idea, and it gives the players more agency over the functioning of the game. However, it is poorly implemented in some ways. As long as players have energy– which is most of the time, since that resource is easy to get– they can save often enough that the significance of death feels lacking. Worse, each time a player respawns at a soul link, they come back to life with as much health as they had when they made the soul link, even if that amount is critically low; this makes it possible to get stuck in a dangerous area without enough health to survive.

The last issue I had with this game was that spikes and environmental hazards generally don’t deal enough damage to instantly kill the player, but stun players so they’ll be hit until they die anyway. This makes respawning after each death more tedious.

Soundtrack Sample: Ash and Bone  

Ori and the Will of the Wisps is a standalone sequel to Ori and the Blind Forest that doesn’t change much. Just as in its predecessor, players platform using the Bash ability and find magic trees and other upgrades to defeat a monstrous bird and save a dying forest. However, Ori and the Will of the Wisps has had some changes, which make it resemble Hollow Knight much more closely. Specifically, it adds weapons to replace Ori and the Blind Forest’s auto-hit combat system. This means that combat requires– but also merits– more attention. Ori and the Will of the Wisps also adds a new way to engage with this system: along with other upgrades, exploring yields Spirit Shards; similar to charms in Hollow Knight, a limited number of these can be equipped for different benefits.

Ori and the Will of the Wisps is very similar to Ori and the Blind Forest, and shares many of the original game’s flaws: its screen doesn’t show enough to navigate properly at top speed, its spirit light system (now currency rather than XP) feels forced and unnecessary, its spikes don’t deal quite enough damage to efficiently kill Ori, and its hard mode adds nothing to the game. It also suffers from some problems Ori and the Blind Forest wasn’t affected by. One of these is that the last ability unlocked trivializes all of the early game’s platforming challenges, which takes some of the fun out of returning to older areas to explore them. The other is caused by the overhauled combat system.The game introduces too many weapons and tools to wield at the same time; instead of trying to do so, players can choose three weapons to use at a time, and change those selections whenever they want. This system works, but is unwieldy, and leads to constant interruptions to gameplay.

However, while Ori and the Will of the Wisps encompasses Ori and the Blind Forest’s flaws, it also encompasses and adds to the first game’s strengths. For example, one of these improvements is the addition of new movement abilities, such as the ability to burrow sand and grapple to the ceiling; these serve the same purpose as the Bash, and improve the game’s movement system just as that ability did. Another improvement is the addition of Spirit Trials, which let players exercise these new skills by racing through a set route in a limited time to earn rewards. 

The spirit shard system is another fun addition to Ori and the Will of the Wisps that Ori and the Blind Forest didn’t have. It lets players craft creative builds and experiment with what charms work well with each other and different abilities– for example, one ability restores health at the cost of energy, which grants potentially infinite healing combined with a charm that lets players use health in place of energy when they are out of the latter. Additionally, Ori and the Will of the Wisps abandons the awkward save system of Ori and the Blind Forest in favor of an automatic saving system. Overall, Ori and the Will of the Wisps is an improvement over Ori and the Blind Forest. 

There’s something else about Ori and the Will of the Wisps that needs to be noted: this game has a tragic, emotional story. Since players directly act as its protagonist, instead of as detached observers, the story can have an incredible emotional impact. People who don’t enjoy stories like that of The Book Thief probably won’t enjoy this either. However, people who enjoy those stories for the catharsis they offer might see this as a strength of the game. Either way, potential buyers should be prepared for this emotional experience. 

Both Ori games can be compared to Hollow Knight. Ori and the Blind Forest has very similar gameplay to that game: in both games, players explore a world to find upgrades such as the wall jump, double jump, and ground pound in order to explore further. Also, in both games, players depend on enemies and obstacles to get around– in Hollow Knight, because of the nail pogo, and in Ori and the Blind Forest, because of the Bash. 

In terms of quality, the Ori games and Hollow Knight are again similar, but overall, Hollow Knight isn’t quite as good as the other two. The Ori games share the strengths that made Hollow Knight good– a good execution of a simple idea, an emotional story, and breathtaking graphics and music– but fix the flaws that held Hollow Knight back. That game’s main flaw was its problem with balance; neither Ori game suffers from this. Another of its major flaws was that significant parts of the game were easy to miss entirely; the Ori games have quest markers which direct players to the next major objective, so this isn’t as much of a problem. 

That point is actually a downside in a way, though: being told the path to take detracts from the joy of finding new things on one’s own. Fortunately, these indicators are far apart and the paths to reach them are often winding and convoluted, which leaves enough exploring in the game for the markers to be a net positive.

This comparison encapsulates the overall relationship between Hollow Knight and the Ori series. The Ori games falter in ways which Hollow Knight doesn’t, such as with their insufficiently damaging spike traps, but they improve on it more often. Hollow Knight is a good game, but the Ori games are better.

Overall rating: 

Ori and the Blind Forest: 8/10

Ori and the Will of the Wisps: 8.5/10

This Game ASAP: Hollow Knight in a different color palette. 

The Deicide Boolean: No.

Tips:

• In both Ori and the Blind Forest and Ori and the Will of the Wisps, play on normal mode, not hard.
• In Ori and the Will of the Wisps, the Deflector spirit shard, found in the bottom left area of Inkwater Marsh, lets you cheese the ending of the final boss fight. I wouldn’t recommend doing this though, because it takes away from the satisfaction of beating the game legitimately.
• In Ori and the Will of the Wisps, don’t pay Lupo to upgrade your map to show collectibles; you can find an upgrade that does the same thing for free later on.