Ori and the Will of the Wisps Is the Rare Sequel That Betters a Beloved Original

At heart this is a metroidvania, and a superb one. You explore a large interconnected world, gaining new abilities that open up areas you could not reach before, and the moment-to-moment joy is in the movement itself. Ori is a genuine pleasure to control: dashing, wall-jumping, bashing off projectiles and enemies to fling across gaps, chaining traversal into something that feels less like platforming and more like a dance. The first game had this too, but the sequel widens the toolkit and the spaces to use it in, so mastery feels endless.

The biggest change from Blind Forest is combat, and it is where opinion is most divided. The original was a platformer that mostly asked you to survive; this one gives Ori a proper arsenal of weapons and a Shard system that lets you customize your build, and it leans into real fights with tougher enemies and boss encounters. For most players this is a clear upgrade that adds variety and stakes. A vocal minority who loved the purity of the first game's movement-focus feel the combat, while good, pulls slightly away from what made Ori special. Both readings are fair, and the game is generous enough with options to suit either.

Structurally, the sequel is much more of a true metroidvania than its predecessor. There is a hub, side quests, collectibles, and optional areas, and the world rewards curiosity and backtracking in a way the more linear first game did not. It gives the adventure more scope and more to do, though a few players miss the tighter, more focused shape of Blind Forest. The escape sequences return too, those heart-in-mouth chases where the world collapses behind you and one mistake means starting over, and they remain some of the most thrilling and stressful set pieces in the genre.

The honest friction is difficulty and, at launch, stability. This is a harder game than the original, with combat and platforming challenges that can spike sharply, and while difficulty options help, players expecting the gentler first game should know what they are getting. On the technical side, the early-days release saw a run of performance issues and bugs that frustrated some players, the most common complaint from that period, and the bulk of them were addressed in patches. Anyone playing now gets a far smoother experience than the launch-week reports suggest.

Those caveats aside, the core loop is close to flawless. Exploring this world, learning its movement, and slowly becoming powerful enough to flow through spaces that once stopped you is deeply satisfying, and the game paces its reveals and its emotional beats with real craft. Whether you come for the platforming, the combat, or the story, it delivers, and it respects your time throughout.

Visually, Ori and the Will of the Wisps is one of the most beautiful games you can play. Moon Studios' hand-painted worlds are rendered with astonishing depth and detail, layered with light, weather, and parallax so that every screen looks like a moving illustration. From glowing forests to drowned depths to windswept ruins, each region has its own palette and mood, and the animation of Ori and the creatures around it is expressive down to the smallest gesture. It is the kind of game people stop playing for a moment just to look at.

The art is not just pretty, it is in service of feeling. The world is designed to make you feel small, then capable, then powerful, and the visual storytelling carries the plot almost entirely without words. Moments of loss, wonder, and triumph land through image and motion alone, which is a rare thing to pull off and rarer still to sustain across a whole game.

Sound completes it, and this is where the game reaches greatness. Gareth Coker's orchestral score is extraordinary, swelling and receding with the action and the emotion, and it does an enormous amount of the storytelling's heavy lifting. Between the visuals and the music, the presentation is not just polished but genuinely moving, and it is the least divisive, most universally praised thing about the entire package.