Out today on Xbox One and Steam, Ori is perhaps the most beautiful game I've ever played. It takes place in a sprawling, fantastical forest, one beset with a darkness that you're attempting to destroy. And it's all rendered in astonishing detail, from the animation to the wonderfully painted backgrounds. You’ll explore areas including dark caverns and colorful woods, and they all feel full of life and movement. You play as Ori, a sort of ghostly cat-like creature, who has recently been taken from his adopted parent, a strange animal that looks like a bear wearing a mask. All of this story is told not with words, but charming animations that show the two characters caring for each other. When Ori first ventures out in the forest on his own, you can see his despair in the way he barely lifts his head as he walks.

This is a hard game

The game itself is fairly straightforward, reminiscent of Metroid and later Castlevania titles. It’s a combination of an action game and a platformer, and it’s just as challenging as the games you remember from the NES. Just like the alien planets in Metroid, the forest is actually one huge, interconnected world, and as you progress and earn new abilities, you'll open up new areas to explore. For example, once you get the ability to double jump, you can hop over gaps you previously couldn't. You can see many of these unreachable areas early on, but it's not until you learn the right ability that you can actually explore them. Much like in Metroid, this makes the act of backtracking through old areas actually fun and exciting; when you unlock a new skill, it can often completely change the way the game plays.

Outside of its structure, Ori is also decidedly old-school when it comes to the difficulty: this is a hard game. You'll often come across regular enemies that can defeat you in just a few hits, so there's really never a time when you can relax. Likewise, the platforming sections can sometimes resemble something out of Super Meat Boy: death traps filled with spikes, laser beams, and other hazards that appear to be impossible to traverse at first glance. This is the kind of game where it'll often take dozens of attempts to get past a single perilous jump. But it’s also the kind of game that’s so good that you’ll keep trying instead of shutting the console off in frustration.