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jeffsoulliere · 8 years ago

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That One Part Where: Manual Saving in Ori and the Blind Forest: Definitive Edition

This is the first in a series of essays on the specifics of video games: the mechanics, story moments, visual motifs, and aural flourishes that take good games and make them great, or turn otherwise unremarkable experiences into treasured classics. Today, I’m talking about the save system in Ori and the Blind Forest, and how it takes what could be an incredibly frustrating game and turns it into a (painfully) fair one.

The phrase “risk versus reward” is well-traveled, especially in discussing game design. The balance between what the player stands to lose and what they hope to gain is a key component to all kinds of games; it is perhaps most purely expressed in traditional casino games where the input is risk (straight cash, homie) and the output a success or failure commensurate with that risk (typically an empty wallet).

For more complex designs, the risk can be abstracted from the reward somewhat. An advantageous sniping perch in a multiplayer shooter has benefits that are immediately apparent to the player, but the risk of becoming an easy, stationary target might not cross your mind until you’re already dead.

Platformers tend to maintain a more direct relationship with risk and reward. Your avatar needs to get from A to B, and there are obstacles in between. There are sometimes rewards (coins, rings, power-ups) off the critical path, obstructed by enemies or difficult jumping challenges. You’re asked to balance your desire for the reward against the chance of failure. Should you attempt that precision jump for the E Tank? There’s a bottomless pit between you and your objective… Is it worth starting the entire level over?

Ori and the Blind Forest has plenty of these moments tucked into its open world, jumping puzzles where improper timing or a botched leap results in instant death. In a level-based game, the severity of this punishment could be balanced by stage checkpoints, or by making the levels themselves shorter. With Ori being less linear, something closer to Super Metroid or latter-day Castlevanias, checkpointing can be a very tricky problem to solve. Too many automatic saves would trivialize the challenge, and too few could destroy player momentum and cause them undue frustration.

Moon Studios found a way to simultaneously empower players and punish them for their hubris: The Soul Link. In addition to sounding like a rad macguffin from an 80’s Marvel comic, the Soul Link allows players to use a pip of Energy to manually create a checkpoint anywhere in the open world. Instead of relying on the map’s pre-positioned fast travel points to save, the game allows the player to determine when and where their next life will begin. The Link manifests in the world as a spawn point and also provides access to the ability tree. If you die, you return to the last place you saved, which is usually one of these manually-created Soul Links.

The “risk” part of this convenience come from the fact that the Energy used to create each Soul Link is drawn from the same pool that fuels your most powerful attacks. This same resource also affords the player access to certain gates around the world map. If you aren’t careful, you can find yourself far from a Soul Link or fast travel point, having expended your Energy reserves.

So when you come upon a series of tough jumps over a pit of pure murder, or vast expanse of deadly spikes to navigate, you have a choice to make. Do you have the energy to make a Link? Is it worth it? How much life do you have? Will those spikes kill in one hit? If you choose to not make a link (or forget to), your inevitable death will be doubly frustrating, because the backtracking you’ll need to do to regain lost progress is entirely your fault.

An unfortunate side-effect of giving players the power to create their own checkpoints in the world is that any time they game takes that ability away (during scripted “chase” sequences, for example), it is especially painful to endure. I died over 300 times in Ori and the Blind Forest, and a considerable number of these deaths happened during the final playable sequence of the game. A thrilling set piece, designed to use every skill I had acquired and all of the experience that came before, but one that was considerably less enjoyable because of its complete lack of checkpointing.

Frustrations aside, the Soul Link mechanic in Ori and the Blind Forest is a brilliant addition to its demanding platforming. It calls the player’s attention to the carefully designed map and its devious traps while also minimizing unnecessary friction. It makes saving feel like a victory instead of a preventative measure, and it does so without trivializing the cost of doing so. That one part of the game is the part that makes it whole.

#ori and the blind forest #Game Criticism #Game essay #thatonepartwhere #platformer #metroidvania #save systems #video games #indie games

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