Ori and the Blind Forest

[Merus]

I've finished it. I really liked it.

[Badfinger]

I'm stuck in the fire temple. :[

 

I agree that the escapes are somewhat antithetical to the rest of the game, mostly because there were no places to save which I feel goes against the spirit of their idea, rather than because it was too hard or just had to be memorized.

[thefncrow]

I finished it about a week ago.  Really fun game.  But if you start to get close to the end (it'll warn you at the point of no return), you might want to bop out and copy your save.  Once you finish the game, it ends, and you can't just go back out and collect anything that's left.  Any save you make past that point will be locked into the final area.  So keep a copy from just before it so you can go back and explore if you want to.  (EDIT: Forgot that kickinthehead already said this.  It's worth repeating though.)

 

I don't necessarily mind the escapes, just as a sort of final test for whatever skills you've gotten up to that point.

 

The game gets a little too free with the energy cells.  There's a bunch of them to be picked up, and it lets you really attain a level where you're rarely scraping by with just a few points.  I found myself basically never using the charge move offensively, so the only things I ever needed them for were the energy lock doors, the occasional set of pickups you had to use the charge to open, and save points.  And once that happens, you can pretty much save at any time.  (Even moreso if you pick up the XP-based ability to make save points only cost half a unit.)

 

The escapes seem to be built in to make sure you can execute over longer stretches, but the total ease of saving kinda means they're the only points where you're really forced to do that.  I kinda feel like maybe they made more sense in a situation where the energy points are sparse, where a stretch of unbroken gameplay like that might be more characteristic.

[Badfinger]

Ok I'm REALLY stuck. :/ If anyone has any hints, I'm in the fire temple and it's a room with two hovering platforms moved by a lever.

 

e: welp that was really simple, as I knew it would be. Dammit.

 

God I really think all the Meatboy escape sequences really do this a disservice. Just finished the game, and what I SHOULD be feeling is exultant for what is overall an awesome game. What I actually feel is really salty because the last one is bullshit.

[Merus]

Yeah, it's clear those sequences needed a lot more playtesting before art was finalised. They all have their problems, and they're different problems.

[Badfinger]

I honestly think something as simple as one or two autosave checkpoints in them would have done it. I was one or two jumps from the end on my second try and had no idea because there's no indication of how long they are.

[Cleinhun]

My biggest problem with the escapes is that they frequently don't give a good indication of where you are supposed to go, especially the final one. I ended up giving on on the last one because I kept not figuring out which part of the screen is the part that makes you not die.

 

Also, the charge shot never felt right to me. In the early game I almost never used it because your energy is so limited and creating save points is way more useful. By the time I had enough energy to spare I had upgraded my normal attack enough that it did basically as much damage as the charge attack anyway.

[Merus]

The last one:

 

They'd already introduced the idea that when the owl is hunting, you have a limited amount of time to get into cover before it will kill you. The entire escape is made up of single segments about that distance except for the last part, where you have to get into cover so that the owl won't get you, and then come out of cover to continue climbing. I think this was probably a mistake because I don't think it's an interesting trap to have a path that you can take except it always kills you, especially during a chase sequence where the ideal is that it's just hard enough that players feel pushed, but not so hard that they fail it and have to repeat it enough that the seams begin to show.

 

Valve's clever use of motion and light to catch the player's eye is noteworthy here; Ori needed to be a lot more obvious about where the game expects you to be - the second escape sequence suffers significantly from this, where it's just not clear what's about to happen and it requires effort (or, more likely, trial and error) to determine where Ori needs to be to survive the next sequence.

[thefncrow]

Final escape spoilers:

What do you mean about the "path that you can take except it always kills you"? Do you mean that little detour off the right on that final vertical passage? Because if so, it doesn't. You're meant to use the standing charge jump to leap past the barbs.

[Merus]

My point was that it looks like it's possible to keep going up the open section and not jump into cover. It probably shouldn't, because there's very little to be gained in this game by making an attractive option that is invariably lethal.

[Badfinger]

Yes, agreed. I died at least twice at that point and felt frustrated for that precise reason.