Recent reviews by shibahan

I have over 900 hours in this game. If this game had better mod/multiplayer support, I'd probably have more.

Combat wise- it's a game for people with imagination and a willingness to exploit game mechanics. To be given a sandbox and decide you're not content with just sand, you're gonna introduce a hose and rocks and a random tree branch. To realize you COULD protect Halsin's portal with the darkness spell but also a collection of boxes and crates stacked into a wall.

The characters are charming, the story is what it is and the mods are saving my aesthetics. Is it a perfect game? No. But it's definitely setting the bar and in this day and age of copy/paste bottom line money generators, you can respect a studio that chooses to create for love and fun rather then a CEO's bonus.

WotW carries much of the spirit of the original. The music and ambience are amazing, the atmosphere charmingly beautiful and the artistic style captivating. The gameplay, while changed, is also addictively challenging but still maintains much of the "trial and error" of the original. (Die first to succeed.) The narrative, however, is significantly weaker than its predecessor. Storytelling seems almost an afterthought or needlessly dramatic to give us purpose. I appreciate the vision but the storyboard could have used some fine tuning. Still a 9/10 for me, all things told which is impressive on its own as I put great emphasis on story. Probably because of the Moki. If you liked the original, play this. Just don't let the hype cloud your expectations.

While the Definitive Version is very lovely in its own way, the change to level design to avoid workaround/imbalance issues and the introduction of new skills to address this issue has caused an entirely new degree of imbalance. Lightburst actually makes it much easier to cheat platforming puzzles and dash ends up negating a good deal of timing challenges when you can just blitz through kill zones. The fact you can also obtain these skills quite early on also serves to only create further imbalance, leaving much of the challenges less difficult than they were in the original version. Can't decide if this was intentional or not but I was decidedly less careful in my playthrough on this version.

That being said, it's still a fantastic atmosphere and it did bring about it's own challenge and entertainment. I would wholeheartedly recommend this game to anyone without hesitation.

I have a critical weakness for games that have simplistic designs, stunning visuals and a soundtrack that I can't wait to put my headphones in for. Needless to say, Ori hits all of those notes and doesn't disappoint. What's even more amazing, at least for me, is that I usually can't stand platformers since I'm intolerably bad at them. But for Ori? That death count doesn't scare me!!

(Makes me cry a little though.)