Ori and the Blind Forest: Definitive Edition

The main attack is an auto-targeting spirit flame, and critics describe fights as mashing one button while dodging: "Just stand still and mash the attack button until you have to dodge an invisible pixel or the enemy is dead." Combat comes up in 9% of reviews and in 24% of negative ones. Critics add that basic enemies take many hits, enemy variety is low, and there are almost no real boss fights, with escape sequences standing in for them. Positive reviews that mention combat often call it the weak part of an otherwise great game, and a smaller group enjoys it, especially once Stomp and Bash give more options.

As players explain it, Soul Link lets you make a save point almost anywhere, but it spends the same energy you need for doors, obstacles and the charged attack. Saving comes up in 5% of reviews and 21% of negative ones. Dying sends you back to the last save and undoes everything since: pickups, opened paths, and the cutscenes you just watched. "If you watch a cutscene be sure to save or else you will be watching it every time you die." A few players saved with low health in a bad spot and got stuck there, and one says that after an early hit in a long stretch you end up dying on purpose to reset. Some reviewers like placing their own checkpoints right before a hard jump and call it forgiving once energy upgrades pile up, while others call it "Absolutely AWFUL save mechanic."

Players name the Ginso Tree's rising water, the end of the Forlorn Ruins, the chases by the owl Kuro and the final escape from Mount Horu. These escape and chase sequences come up in 5% of reviews and 13% of negative ones. Reviewers describe long scripted runs where one mistake restarts the whole thing, timing that depends on an enemy firing a projectile you can Bash off, and dozens to hundreds of attempts. Some quit for good at the Ginso Tree. "All of the emotional weight was entirely dampened by my rage at the escape sequences," one wrote. Positive reviews are divided on them: some call the escapes a highlight, and others recommend the game in spite of them. "If there is a "skip annoying chase" option, it would flip to a Highly Recommended in a heartbeat," one negative review says.

"Ori controls like he is on ice the entire time." Complaints like this appear in 3% of reviews and in 19% of negative ones. Players call Ori floaty, slippery and imprecise, say the same input gives different results, and describe jumps placed right at the edge of Ori's range. Wall jumping and wall climbing come up again and again: "The amount you slide down when you are wall climbing is the most ridiculous thing ive ever seen in my life." Others mention dropped inputs, a ground pound that triggers on a diagonal stick, and accidental double jumps off walls. A few suspect the feel is worse with V-Sync on, and some of the stutter complaints below describe the same symptom.

Ori, the spirit flame, enemy shots and pickups are all glowing orbs, and reviewers describe projectiles they mistook for experience orbs, spikes that blend into the background, and foreground scenery covering the action. 3% of reviews say the visuals get in the way of play, and 10% of negative reviews do. "art is pretty but also really impractical for gameplay like I actually cannot see anything I'm supposed to pay attention to most of the time," one player wrote. A couple of players say Ori is too small to follow on the Steam Deck screen, and others note there is no zoom or option to turn off screen shake.

"Ori and the stuttering forest," one review reads in full, and another found that "the more powerful the computer hardware you use to play the game, the worse the game runs". Technical problems come up in 2% of reviews and 10% of negative ones, some of them from players with high-end hardware. They describe heavy stutter, the game running in slow motion, frame drops, resolutions above 720p or 1080p that won't stick, the game opening on the wrong monitor, black screens on launch and crashes. Some blame high refresh rates. Positive reviews often include fixes: turning V-Sync off ("turning off vsync fixed it tho, so if you also have that issue, turn off vsync."), the -force-d3d9 launch option, capping the display at 60Hz, or a high-DPI override on the executable. A few Steam Deck OLED owners say the game misbehaves at 90Hz and runs well when lowered. For other players nothing worked and they refunded.

Changing keys means editing a text file in the game folder, which players found clumsy or, on Linux and non-English keyboards, not workable: one "spent 14 minutes trying to rebind keys." Fewer than 1% of reviews raise this, but it comes up in 3% of negative reviews, mostly from keyboard players. Left-handed players and those with PlayStation pads report wrong mappings or on-screen prompts that don't match their buttons, and several say the game only felt right on an Xbox-style controller.

Bugs that block progress appear in 1% of reviews. One player's completion run ended at a boulder that never appeared: "my 100% run died when I got soft-locked by missing boulder that was supposed to block a laser in moon grotto/black root burrows". Another got stuck at 99% in the Moon Grotto without knowing whether it was a bug. Others mention a glide that stopped working in the Valley of the Wind escape, inputs that stopped registering, and deleted saves, one of them after a power cut during a cutscene.