SPIRITED AWAY
Seems like Evil Edna’s cast a spell on ORI AND THE WILL OF THE WISPS.
Sequel Ori and the Will of the Wisps is a much larger and more complex metroidvania than Ori and the Blind Forest, and as a result, it can be sloppier. Bugs and inconsistencies frustrated me along the way, especially as I had no guides to help. But Will of the Wisps is also one of the best-looking 2D games ever made, and navigating it feels fantastic—its physics are just right, so leaping and dashing through it is just intrinsically fun.
It’s not just the map and story that’s bigger. The combat is much more involved than it was in Blind
Forest— though still isn’t great. It’s hard to see what’s going on through all the visual noise, and Ori’s sword combos can obscure enemy animations. I got tired of fighting the same enemy types, so I’d cheese them where I could—hopping around above them sometimes works—or try to ignore them.
Normal difficulty mode is the way Will of the Wisps is ‘meant’ to be played according to the menu, and the ultra-hard escape sequences are part of what I liked about the last game. It feels awfully good to vaporize all the crawling things in half the time on easy mode, though. Fighting the same handful of enemy types for ten-plus hours is not what makes Ori fun.
It’s about the platforming, and the basic jumping, double-jumping, and dashing is precise and super satisfying, just like it was in Ori and the Blind Forest. You can launch a glowing energy rope at hooks and sling yourself into the air, chaining grapples like Spider-Man. You can freeze time when you’re next to a projectile and then launch it and yourself in opposite directions, bouncing between glowing bullets as if you’re ricocheting off them. There are many places to stop and rest, but you rarely have to give up any speed if you don’t want to.
WILL POWERS
With ten areas, there are a ton of special movement abilities and puzzle types, some more successful than others. Diving into sand pits and bouncing around like a pinball before shooting back out like a sandworm from Dune is brilliant. The bits that take after Portal, meanwhile, are disappointing. They don’t play much with momentum and, for the most part, you just go in one blue hole and out another. But even the bits that are only so-so usually feel great to clear—like flawlessly running through an ultra-hard Guitar Hero song.
The locations are all stunning, too, and there’s the standard variety,
Nothing else looks quite like the Ori games do in motion
including the obligatory snow and water levels. That’s not to say they’re generic. Nothing else looks quite like the Ori games do in motion.
And like Ori and the Blind Forest, Will of the Wisps is on a mission to pull both delight and sadness out of even the most determined grumps. This one does a better job of it, with multiple characters that put in more effort to endear themselves. The end may well induce some sniffling depending on your disposition.
If the sentimental stuff doesn’t land for you, it might be because you’re still fuming over the boss fights and escape scenes by the time you get to the end. Some of them can be seriously annoying, especially when the visual information you’re getting just isn’t clear, and you don’t know what you’re meant to do. But I like the escapes better than the traditional boss fights with their big health bars. Clearing them is satisfying, but in the way it would also be satisfying to stop punching yourself after a prolonged period of punching yourself.
Take Will of the Wisps at a relaxed pace, though, and you’ll collect lots of spirit money to upgrade Ori’s abilities with. Hunting down energy and life cells throughout the world also makes things easier, so that if a boss is frustrating, at least you can go away and improve the math in your favor.
Ori and the Blind Forest is fantastic for its compactness and simplicity, but Ori and the Will of the Wisps is also worth playing to the end— though it’ll take much longer. It trips over its size and complexity at times, and really doesn’t need so much combat, but it’s gorgeous and funny, and the triple-jumping could go on forever without getting old.