Dem Feels - Ori And The Blind Forest

Creepy fan-fiction usually involves some of people's favourite characters from games, books, movies and tv shows and a lot of boning. Now imagine you could expand that kind of thing and include not only characters, but some of your favourite things. Let's say Metroid or Castlevania hook up with a movie by Studio Ghibli and they get a little drunk and start fooling around and one thing leads to another and nine months later you end up with Ori and the Blind Forest.

The game's incredibly beautiful, artsy visuals, the cute, fluffy characters and the orchestral musical store, which is made from only the purest goosebumps, will kick you right in the crotch until you cry, especially when you watch the game's depressing intro:

It may not be Super Meat Boy, but damn, it's not an easy game! At the end of each dungeon there's an escape sequence of sorts, where you have to use every special move at your disposal to gtfo as quickly as possible - a single mistake usually ends in instant death - no checkpoints, no rewinding, it's back to the beginning of the sequence. Everywhere else in the game is fine, as you get to place save and respawn points pretty much anywhere you want, but the rapid escape scenarios are punishingly difficult and require you to memorize every inch. Some people on the Steam forums argue that much of it is down to reflexes, but when a random boulder just falls on you without warning, there is very little chance to react and you'll just have to respawn and remember where the damn thing drops.

I've seen a thread where a guy has utterly pulverized his Xbox 360 controller whilst playing the game and I'm happy to report beating the entire game with zero peripherals thrown or destroyed. With that said, I remember days in the 8/16 bit era, where games were criticized for forcing you to memorize levels in order to beat them. It never got bad enough to make me ragequit, but I came close a few times.

The difficulty reminds me of Dark Souls a bit. The game is perfectly fine once you master the controls and know exactly what to expect in each area of the game, which is why you'll see a bunch of people getting all smug over how "easy" this is, but trust me, it'll likely take you a while till you reach that stage. I don't usually like commented gameplay, but I may have to look up the youtube channels of some folks I like to watch now and then to see how they're getting on with Ori.
If you like your games a little more on the difficult side and you're a sucker for amazing music and artwork, then this thing belongs in your games library, especially since it's very affordable at 20 Euros or eight bags of potatoes and a goat or whatever people pay with in your country.

And then Youtube recommended random Skyrim videos to me, so.... yeah.

Honey, I'm home!

With literally hundreds of mods, texture upgrades, custom ENB settings, lens effects, sun sprites and god only knows what the fuck else, this thing is still the single-most amazing thing I've ever played. And now that it doesn't just look better than real life and stopped crashing every ten minutes, I can also record the damn thing at a stable 60 FPS, so maybe I'm gonna fill up my youtube channel with some more Skyrim next week. But first I have syndicate missions to complete on Warframe and loyalty tokens to earn on Everquest 2. I need more hours in my day.

-Cat