As you work your way back to a previously unreachable spot, your new powers are almost guaranteed to help you discover a few hidden power-ups and secret areas along the way, making the trip feel worthwhile. And while there's no fast-travel in Ori's sprawling world (which is mildly annoying), it compensates by making backtracking actually enjoyable. Not that that's necessarily a chore Ori's level design is striking, with lots of distinct, memorable areas that are fun to get around in even after you've visited them a few times. Forget to use them, however, and it might take you a while to find your way back to where you were. If you do, Soul Links are a huge asset, letting you instantly respawn just before (or after) trouble spots and saving you the hassle of repeating tough areas. There's very little auto-saving in Ori, and death reverts you to your last save, so it's up to you to remember to save often. The escape sequences walk a fine line between being rewardingly difficult and infuriating, partly because they disable your most important ability: the creation of "Soul Links," which let you save almost anywhere. With no checkpoints, mastery through repetition becomes crucial, and that mastery gets a little easier if you can rely on muscle memory to, say, catapult yourself over an incoming fireball before scampering up a wall to relative safety. Here, the difficulty spikes wildly as you're forced to execute a precise series of moves while death closes in on your heels. While taxing, those feel like cakewalks next to each dungeon's climax: an intense, no-room-for-error escape sequence that makes Metroid's time-bomb finales seem tame by comparison. That's important, because Ori's exploration sometimes feels like training for the real challenges: Its dungeons, a trio of self-contained levels that push you to make heavy use of whatever abilities you've found beforehand, and which sometimes feature unique challenges, like carrying a gravity-bending orb that lets Ori safely walk upside-down across lethally hot surfaces. The progression from powerless sprite-child to nimble engine of destruction is elegantly smooth, with so many opportunities to use each skill that, by the time you've discovered the next one, using the previous ability will have become second nature. Like any good Metroidvania, these abilities – which let Ori pull off moves like double-jumping, wall-climbing, stomping through weak platforms, and grabbing enemies or projectiles to slingshot himself in different directions – open up new areas for exploration while adding to Ori's combat repertoire. Three stolen, life-sustaining elements need to be restored to their respective homes first, and finding them means trekking across a huge 2D landscape of interconnected areas, uncovering hidden power-ups, and earning new abilities along the way. Of course, the forest can’t be saved as easily as simply returning your floating companion to his tree.
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