Ori and the Blind Forest

Ori and the Blind Forest is a platform-adventure Metroidvania video game developed by Moon Studios? and published by Microsoft Studios, released for Windows and Xbox One on March 11, 2015.¹⁵ Players control Ori, a small white forest spirit, aided by Sein, a floating orb that represents the light and energy of the Spirit Tree and serves as Ori’s means of attack.⁴ Set in the dying forest of Nibel, the game combines exploration, light puzzle-solving, and precise platforming as Ori grows stronger, unlocks new abilities, and works to restore light to the ruined world.¹³¹⁴

The narrative follows Ori, a young orphan spirit fostered by the rotund, bear-like Naru, whose idyllic life is shattered when a storm ravages the forest and all but destroys the Spirit Tree.¹³ Stranded and alone, Ori is hunted by Kuro, a colossal owl, and guided by Sein to restore the three elements of Waters, Winds, and Warmth.¹³ The story is told largely without spoken dialogue, and reviewers repeatedly singled out the wordless, emotionally affecting prologue depicting Ori mourning the death of the mother figure who raised them.⁶¹³¹⁶ Moon Studios programmer Phisamoe stated the developers did not intend Ori to be specifically a boy or a girl, leaving the character’s gender open to interpretation, and confirmed that Kuro is a mother, with the name taken from the Japanese word for “black”.⁹

Development

Ori and the Blind Forest is the first game from Moon Studios, an unusually distributed developer whose team members work remotely from Sweden, Vienna, Israel, Germany, Australia, the United States, and elsewhere; some had never met in person until the game’s reveal at E3 2014.⁵¹¹ The studio was founded by Thomas Mahler, a former cinematic artist at Blizzard Entertainment.⁶ The game spent four years in development, with Microsoft signing on to publish roughly three years before release, at a point when the visuals were still bare-bones placeholder art.⁵¹¹ Mahler has said the team spent 18 months polishing the gameplay before the art came together, invoking his training in traditional sculpture: “You don’t work on detail until the base is made up”.⁵ The game runs on the Unity? engine and was shown at E3 running in 1080p at 60 frames per second with no loading screens.²

Mahler described a core goal of making “the game feel better than it looks,” aiming for “completely pixel-perfect platforming”.⁵ What convinced Microsoft to publish was not the art but the controls; publishing producer Dan Smith recalled the movement felt “so superb” and praised the “special care and thoughtfulness around the puzzle design”.⁵ The art followed a strict philosophy against tiled or repeated textures, with programmer David Clark stating the team wanted “each and every screen in the game to look uniquely hand-drawn”; Smith said the eight-to-ten-hour adventure contains unique assets in nearly every locale, with “no tiling whatsoever”.⁷⁵ The lighting and shadows have individual behaviors for different flora and fauna, and reviewers described the world of Nibel as hand-drawn and lovingly crafted.¹³

Gameplay

As a Metroidvania, the game presents a large, fundamentally nonlinear world that is progressively unlocked as Ori acquires abilities such as wall jump, double jump, and a charge flame to blast through barriers.¹⁸ Players revisit earlier areas with new powers to uncover secrets, collectibles, and hidden regions, while the map tracks completion for players seeking 100 percent.⁴¹⁸ The signature power, “bash,” unlocked around a third of the way through, lets Ori slingshot through enemies, projectiles, and light sources to stay airborne or smash through obstacles.¹³

Combat centers on Sein, a ranged attacker who slashes enemies without the need for targeting; defeating monsters earns Spirit Lights, a form of experience that feeds a skill tree divided into combat, traversal, and Soul Link branches.⁴¹¹ Reviewers widely judged the combat the weakest element, describing the basic attack as spamming a ranged orb.¹⁶²⁰ The game deliberately avoids conventional boss fights; Mahler said he wanted to avoid the “obligatory nature of bossfights,” which can break the rhythm of platforming, in favor of significant, sparingly encountered character moments.²

The game’s distinctive save mechanic is the Soul Link, which lets players spend a resource called Spirit Energy to create a checkpoint and level-up shrine almost anywhere, provided they have enough energy — energy that can also be used offensively, making each save a tactical decision.⁴⁵ One reviewer likened Soul Links to “a mix between Resident Evil’s typewriter ribbons and Dark Souls’ bonfires”.⁵ The game is difficult, with fixed save points supplemented by player-placed links; the escape sequences following the acquisition of each element, which lack checkpoints, drew particular note for their punishing difficulty — one reviewer finished at 98 percent completion in about ten hours having died 604 times.¹³

Influences and lineage

The developers cited a wide range of antecedents. Mahler credited Super Mario Bros. 3 as “perfect platforming” and named Super Meat Boy? as the first game in 15 to 20 years whose controls he thought could rival Mario, the two games that drove the team’s pursuit of precise, weighty jumping.⁵²² The wall-jump mechanic was compared to Mega Man X, and Mahler cited the Nintendo classic Metroid as a prime influence on the game’s exploration structure.⁴⁶ Clark and other developers pointed to modern Rayman? games and the UbiArt Framework as inspiration for the hand-drawn look, though Moon rejected Rayman’s repeated textures and built on Unity instead.⁷² The atmosphere and watercolor art were widely compared to the films of Hayao Miyazaki? and Studio Ghibli, and the game drew on animated films including The Iron Giant and The Lion King for its coming-of-age, allegorical story of self-discovery.⁵⁶¹⁶ Reviewers also linked the checkpoint tension to Dark Souls, whose speed-run ethos Mahler cited when envisioning how players might race through the game.²

The game is often placed alongside later Metroidvanias; one reviewer compared its pure sense of motion to Hollow Knight by Team Cherry, and to the Mario games, as fellow works achieving a comparable joy of movement.¹⁹

Editions and reception

Ori and the Blind Forest: Definitive Edition added new areas and abilities, multiple difficulty levels — including an easy mode, a hard mode, and a one-life mode — and an improved fast-travel system.¹⁶ The game came to Nintendo Switch on September 27, 2019, ending its console exclusivity to Xbox four years after its debut; a planned Xbox 360 version was cancelled.¹⁶¹⁸ It was later bundled with its sequel, Ori and the Will of the Wisps?, as Ori: The Collection, a single cartridge released October 12, 2021, published by iam8bit with Moon Studios and Xbox Game Studios.¹²

The game was widely acclaimed, with reviewers praising its art, orchestral score, movement, and story while noting inconsistent difficulty pacing and weak combat.¹³¹⁶ Nintendo World Report called it “one of the modern classics of the Metroid-esque genre,” and Nintendo Life scored the Switch version 9 out of 10, calling the port flawless.¹⁶¹⁸ As of the Switch storefront listing retrieved in 2026, the digital Switch version was priced at US$19.99.¹⁴ On Steam, 95 percent of the game’s 13,472 user reviews were positive as of July 2026.¹⁵