Weekly 'What are you playing' Thread #11

Carp, please pin this weekly thread ^_^ (<- me when you pin it)

Finish Ori and the Blind Forest this week. I have a lot of thoughts about it but won't go into detail because I'm both too old and too busy to be talking about children's video games. So, in a nutshell: On the surface, everything about this game seems great, as it ticks all the boxes of a good video game, e.g. it's visually impressive, has a great soundtrack, its plot is gut-wrenching yadda yadda yadda I'm already tired talking about this game because the following elements are terrible: (I) the combat is very unsatisfying and barebones, (ii) exploration being hidden behind new mechanics is fun but not every 'level' needs five of them, (iii) for a game that is praised as a masterpiece, the zones shouldn't be barely connected stages but should rather be intertwined to create an immersive world, (iv) some of the levels (especially the escape sequences) are visually unintelligible, as you sometimes can't tell whether things are in the foreground or background, you don't know whether thorns will kill you in one move or not or the fact that all enemy attacks blend in perfectly with the visuals so you cannot even see them at all; although the worst of all the mistakes they did designing the levels is the god awful approach in which you sometimes cannot even see the screen you want to go to or rather what obstacles lie there. So you're basically encouraged to jump, die to see what this part of the stage looks like, and then try again. This trial-and-error motif is a recurring one throughout the game, and frankly, it is very annoying. Games of this genre are supposed to be intuitive and easy to pick up and understand, but for what it's worth, I'm already spending 2 minutes more than I needed to, and once I found out that you don't just have 3 energy thingies and 3 life thingies, the game got a LOT easier than it was before, but that's on me.

Anyways, I've started playing Super Meat Boy and Celeste again because both these games are much better than Ori (even though they barely fit into the same genre).