PC World - USA (2020-04)

APRIL 2020 PCWorld 83

They’re chained together, sometimes dozens

in a row—double jump off the ledge into the

wall, then leap towards the other side,

air-dash, catapult yourself off an enemy

mid-air, touch the other wall, run up it, use the

incoming projectile to propel yourself higher,

and so on, until finally, palms slick with sweat,

you find a moment to sit and breathe.

It’s instinctive, a force operating in the

player’s subconscious. It’s that elusive “flow”

state, and while Ori is hardly the only puzzle-

platformer to induce this feeling, it’s rare.

(Celeste [go.pcworld.com/cste] has its

moments, as do Super Meat Boy and the

oft-overlooked Rayman Origins.) It takes an

extraordinary amount of skill on the part of the

developers, designing levels that are

readable at a glance, the player hurtling

through them as fast as they appear

on-screen.

As such, the best additions to Ori and the

Will of the Wisps are all movement-related. A

grappling hook whips Ori along at high

finds it. Burrowing into the
sand, he pauses, heart racing.
Or maybe it’s my heart.
Who can say, really?

PERFORMANCE
First, the briefest note on
performance—and I’m only
doing this because from what
I’ve heard, the baseline Xbox
One version of Ori and the Will
of the Wisps is pretty rough. Suffice it to say,
the game ran great on my PC. I have an
Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti which is
admittedly overkill, but aside from one point
where it was slow to load a cutscene,
everything went fine. Assuming that bears out
on lower-end GPUs, I wouldn’t worry much.
A word of warning if you’re planning to
play on the Xbox though. Microsoft says
there’s a day one patch coming, but didn’t
know when that patch would be ready, nor
was I all that concerned. This is PCWorld,
after all.
In any case, back to the review.

REMEMBER THE
MOUNTAIN BED
Ori and the Will of the Wisps is about speed.
That’s what I love most about it. Plenty of
games have a double-jump and an air dash
and a wall-climb, but there’s a kineticism to
Ori. Obstacles are almost never a single
discrete hurdle for the player to overcome.