If you were to judge Ori and the Blind Forest solely by appearances – its prominent images of Ori being cuddled by his rotund adoptive mother Naru, for instance – you might assume you were in for a short, pleasantly tepid art-house platformer, the kind where gameplay exists mainly to support lavish graphics and the emotional pull of the story. Instead, Ori is a demanding, cleverly intricate Metroidvania-style adventure in which a quick trigger finger and perfect timing matter almost as much as exploring its secret-filled environments. That it’s also stunningly pretty, includes a sweeping orchestral score, and tugs at the heartstrings certainly doesn't hurt, either.

Loading

Of course, the forest can’t be saved as easily as simply returning your floating companion to his tree. Three stolen, life-sustaining elements need to be restored to their respective homes first, and finding them means trekking across a huge 2D landscape of interconnected areas, uncovering hidden power-ups, and earning new abilities along the way. Like any good Metroidvania, these abilities – which let Ori pull off moves like double-jumping, wall-climbing, stomping through weak platforms, and grabbing enemies or projectiles to slingshot himself in different directions – open up new areas for exploration while adding to Ori's combat repertoire. The progression from powerless sprite-child to nimble engine of destruction is elegantly smooth, with so many opportunities to use each skill that, by the time you've discovered the next one, using the previous ability will have become second nature.

That's important, because Ori's exploration sometimes feels like training for the real challenges: Its dungeons, a trio of self-contained levels that push you to make heavy use of whatever abilities you've found beforehand, and which sometimes feature unique challenges, like carrying a gravity-bending orb that lets Ori safely walk upside-down across lethally hot surfaces. While taxing, those feel like cakewalks next to each dungeon's climax: an intense, no-room-for-error escape sequence that makes Metroid's time-bomb finales seem tame by comparison. Here, the difficulty spikes wildly as you're forced to execute a precise series of moves while death closes in on your heels. With no checkpoints, mastery through repetition becomes crucial, and that mastery gets a little easier if you can rely on muscle memory to, say, catapult yourself over an incoming fireball before scampering up a wall to relative safety.

The escape sequences walk a fine line between being rewardingly difficult and infuriating, partly because they disable your most important ability: the creation of "Soul Links," which let you save almost anywhere. There's very little auto-saving in Ori, and death reverts you to your last save, so it's up to you to remember to save often. If you do, Soul Links are a huge asset, letting you instantly respawn just before (or after) trouble spots and saving you the hassle of repeating tough areas. Forget to use them, however, and it might take you a while to find your way back to where you were.

Not that that's necessarily a chore; Ori's level design is striking, with lots of distinct, memorable areas that are fun to get around in even after you've visited them a few times. And while there's no fast-travel in Ori's sprawling world (which is mildly annoying), it compensates by making backtracking actually enjoyable. As you work your way back to a previously unreachable spot, your new powers are almost guaranteed to help you discover a few hidden power-ups and secret areas along the way, making the trip feel worthwhile. If you're a completist, however, you'll want to fill out the map before tackling Ori's final stage; completing the 10-hour story locks your save file, forcing you to start a new game (unless you had the foresight to make a pre-endgame copy of your save) if you want to discover things you missed.

As fun as exploration is, combat is a little more uneven. Hammering enemies with fireballs is satisfying at first, but feels weak and ineffectual later on, so it's often better to use Ori's other moves, like catapulting enemy projectiles back at their owners, bashing monsters into thorny walls, or simply stomping them when they get underfoot. Having a diverse range of attacks is great, but none of them feel quite as precise as simply shooting, and they can frequently backfire (by sending Ori shooting into thorns, for example) while you're learning to use them effectively. Loading

Also, Ori always feels fragile, even when his life meter is filled out, and his tiny onscreen presence (coupled with the abundance of glowing projectiles flying both ways) can sometimes make it hard to tell exactly where you are, who's shooting, and whether that shimmering blob sailing toward you is acidic goop or a clutch of harmless XP orbs. It doesn't ruin the experience, but it can lead to a few awkward deaths as you frantically leap into danger to grab a power-up.