Ori and the Blind Forest hard mode playthrough log part 7 - Final

Mount Horu, the last area of the game, has an incredible difficulty spike...

There's fire and lava everywhere, and even most of the floors that you can stand on, will hurt you if you stand on them for more than like half a second. There's a bunch of really fast shooting enemies that can only be defeated by their own projectiles, and often you NEED their projectiles to get up through the paths, so you have to kinda avoid killing them.

At the top of this area, there's two doors that lead to some linear action/puzzle sections where you push a rock down to block the lava flows, and this opens up a couple more doors below... each door leads to more difficult action/puzzle sections that open up more of the Mount Horu area, until eventually you get to the bottom where you find the final element.

Ori and the Blind Forest hard mode playthrough log part 6

There's a few things that I'm able to get now with the Light Burst ability, but it seems there's still some breakable looking walls and stuff that I can't get through yet... Only one ability left so whatever that is has to be the thing to break walls.

Next area is Sorrow Pass, up above Valley of the Wind. Interestingly, this area has a lot more wind/gliding sections than Valley of the Wind had... It's supposed to be the fire area, isn't it?

The enemies in Sorrow Pass are even tougher than in Misty Woods and Forlorn Ruins. It's a very linear path of almost entirely wind gliding obstacles... There's a big central vertical structure that you keep coming back to and opening up more shortcuts as you go further along... Eventually I made it to the last ability and warp point... This last ability is the charge jump, which lets you break through breakable ceilings, and you can also use it while clinging to the wall to charge jump horizontally and break through walls. It starts getting confusing with all the buttons you have to press to do an aimed charge jump off a wall...

Also I'm realizing this climb ability is actually more useful than I thought. Not only is it needed to do a horizontal charge jump, but it's also very useful for dodging enemy attacks in certain situations where you don't have any ground to stand on.

Now I've opened up the path to where the objective marker is telling me to go... and something tells me that might be the final level of the game, because I don't see any other big sections opening up after this... unless maybe you go inside the Spirit Tree for the finale. I guess now is the time to re-explore the entire world one last time and collect everything...

I stopped leveling the blue ability branch after I got the Triple Jump. The last ability on that branch is just extra defense, but I wanna try and beat hard mode without that. Instead I started grinding the purple path so I can get all of the things that'll let me see where all the items are in order to 100% the game. I'm only half-way through the red path, and haven't unlocked the Cinder Flame ability yet... If it turns out I don't have enough ability points to unlock that before getting to the final boss, then I'm just gonna try and beat the game without it. No deliberate grinding allowed.

There, that was easy... I now have all of the items on the map. I didn't even need to unlock the "see fake walls" ability. Although I'm still missing one energy cell... I'm guessing it must be in this last area coming up, because it doesn't show up anywhere on the map.

Screenshots:

Ori and the Blind Forest hard mode playthrough log part 5

I can't think of much new stuff that the glide ability gives me access to... all I know is that the next destination, for the Veil of Warmth, is further northwest of the Valley of the Wind.

I found out that the Black Root Burrows is actually an extra optional area that was added in to the Definitive Edition of this game, and I actually have everything I need to go through this area now... It turns out this area isn't as hard as I initially thought. Of course, now that I have a ton more life capacity and save capacity, this helps a lot.

There's another glowing orb thing that you gotta carry around, just like in Forlorn Ruins, except instead of allowing you to walk up certain walls/ceilings, this glowing orb lights up the area around you and also makes certain invisible platforms visible, and makes those blue light doors invisible so you can pass through them. You don't have access to any of your acrobatic abilities while carrying the orb, so it's a bit tougher of a platforming challenge... fortunately you can still drop the orb whenever you are safely on the ground, in order to more easily kill the enemies around you to make carrying the orb around easier. I just realized how useful the bash ability is in combat. Using it to deflect the enemy projectiles back at them as a means of getting rid of them, is much safer than rying to engage in close combat and platforming while at the same time dancing around their projectiles.

After getting through the darkness area and putting the orb back in its place, the entire area becomes bright again... and I already managed to get all the ability cell pickups here while it was dark lol... but the path in Black Root Burrows actually continues... I get the dash ability, which apparently is completely optional outside of this extra area... and since I already unlocked air dash in the ability tree I have that move now as well... This makes navigating through the world even faster and less tedious than before (and it already wasn't very tedious at all).

Next is a few platforming sections making use of the dash, and then you get to ANOTHER new ability, the Light Burst, which is basically a Yoshi's Island egg throw. This place uses this ability a lot to activate switches that only the Light Burst can reach... and you can also through the Light Burst straight up and then do a bash off of it in midair to get extra height without the use of an enemy... this opens up so much... I think pretty much nothing is out of reach anymore...

I'm not sure what's up with this little story sequence at the end of this area... it shows ghost images of a bunch more of those fat characters like the one who adopted Ori in the beginning... one of them died and then the other left home and went somewhere else.

Screenshots:

Ori and the Blind Forest hard mode playthrough log part 4

Forlorn Ruins... already I'm hopelessly stuck... wtf am I supposed to do here at this part with the floating blocks? You can fall on one of them sideways, but that doesn't get you anywhere except towards a wall of spikes.

... aw damn... I had to look up a walkthrough to figure out that you can walk along all 4 sides of those floating cubes... that never even crossed my mind at all. The rest of it was easy... then there's an epic escape sequence, just like in the Ginso Tree... except this time you mostly just use the glide power to ride the wind while avoiding falling spikes and stuff... that part's really annoying, mostly just a matter of trial and error.

We get some backstory on Kuro, the evil owl thing... it turns out he's not evil, he's just trying to protect his family, cuz his species is very weakened by the Spirit Tree's light or something... and I'm guessing the Valley of the Wind is close to where he lives, because this is where Kuro finds Ori and there's a stealth sequence going back through Valley of the Wind to get avoid getting killed by him.

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Ori and the Blind Forest hard mode playthrough log part 3

I'm glad I started grinding the blue ability tree path, cuz it looks like I'm really gonna need that infinite air for the swimming sections in hard mode.

I re-explored everything again with my new powers, and then I ended up getting to the Warmth element area before figuring out how to get to the wind place. The top-left of Hollow Grove has some really crazy enemies, including one that shoots an instant-death laser all around it... and you really need to get good with the Bash move to get through this place... I got a teleporter and a few more energy/life cells out of it, but this isn't the way to progress right now. Also yeah I got the infinite swimming by the time I finished all of this.

Now I'm at 43% total completion by the time I even start heading towards the Wind area. By the time I get to Valley of the Wind, I'm so good at using the Bash ability, and I have so many life cells and energy cells that I'm actually finding the game a bit easy now.

Then, instead of going into Misty Woods which is where my destination is, I explored further to the south of Valley of the Wind... it seems the path keeps going this way. There's a lot of weird green glowy liquid down here... and then further down it turns into this frozen over area that looks really amazing...

I don't know if I'm supposed to be down here yet or not... but I guess I'll just keep going until I get to a road block.
ooh, so it turns out this is where you need to go after you explore the Misty Woods... at least I got the map for this area... Valley of the Wind is now 80% completed already lol

Wow... I did not see that insane difficulty spike at Misty Woods coming at all. This place is incredibly hard on hard mode. Not only is it hard to figure out where you're going since there's no map, but I also get disoriented often since I don't remember which way I was going after I die... there's a lot of stuff here that makes use of both the Bash ability and the new gliding ability. Also I got enough ability points to unlock the triple jump during this part... it doesn't really change the game that much.

This place keeps changing too... it's like, I think I went back and forth a few times but it was different each time, so it felt like I may or may not have been going the right way. By the time I got the lantern thing to make the map appear again and turned the forest back to normal, I managed to get 94% completion in this area... Now that I see the map it looks very linear, but I'm pretty sure there were more parts of it that aren't shown on this map. I don't know where to go to get the last 6% of this area done.

Ori and the Blind Forest hard mode playthrough log part 2

I spent like the next hour re-exploring everywhere to get what I can with double jump... there's a few things I noticed that seem impossible to get to, even after I get the triple jump and air dash.

I've now unlocked air dash through the skill tree, but I can't actually use it yet because I haven't yet learned the normal dash.

Finally, after getting a few more life cells and energy cells, now I feel much less vulnerable and I can actually tank a few hits before dying... now I'll start the inside of the Ginso Tree.

This place is kinda annoying, but also fun... It took me a LOT of deaths before I realized that going through portals refreshes your double jump. This area is a very unique section made up of single-screen rooms that keep going further and further up the tree.

Eventually I got to a new power, which is kind of like an air dash, except it's more like a counter move that bounces you off projectiles/enemies and rockets you in whatever direction you choose. If you use this on a projectile, the projectile will go in the opposite direction that you get bounced in... this gimmick is used immediately in the 2nd half of the Ginso Tree...

After you destroy the thorny things that were corrupting the tree and preventing it from producing water, suddenly there's an intense escape sequence where you have to use your skills to climb up through the rest of the tree while a rush of water comes flooding up from below you... there's also a bunch of energy pickups along the way and of course I want to get all of them during this escape segment cuz I don't know if I'll be able to come back here.

That last part was really fun, it reminded me of a Rayman Origins/Legends sort of level. I got all the things inside the tree, but somehow the map only shows this area as 99% completed. I guess it's because there's some small corner of the map that I didn't go into in order to make it so the map is fully explored.

Ori and the Blind Forest hard mode playthrough log part 1

This game has amazing presentation... the beginning cutscene really drew me in.

The gameplay... it's okay I guess. Once the real game starts and you gain the ability to shoot homing shots, I'm thinking this isn't very fun yet, but it'll probably get better as I gain more abilities. I can see on the pause menu that there's quite a lot of new abilities to unlock.

I really like the save system. You can technically save anywhere, but it uses up soul energy, which I think auto-recharges at a slow rate or something? Either that, or you need to collect it from the blue glowy things. There's expansions you can get that let you store more soul energy cells at a time.

There's also a skill tree menu that you can only access at your save points. Once you've created a save point, you can always go back to it and access the skill tree. The stuff that enemies drop is the currency that you use to gain skills. I can't tell whether enemies respawn based on time or on distance, but either way they made it so it'd be really stupidly tedious to grind in the early areas for a bunch of skills.

The first skill I unlocked was the "shoot faster" skill obviously. I bet there'll be a skill to increase the range of the homing shots because right now you really have to put yourself in danger in order to hit anything. Then I got the "pickups float toward you" skill, then the skill that lets you re-use your custom save points infinitely, so you don't need to wait for a soul recharge in order to save again.

So far the gameplay mostly revolves around exploring every path to collect the keys and then going back to unlock the locked door to progress. Also there are map stone things, like the map consoles in Metroid, except you have to find the missing pieces before it'll work.

After getting the wall jump ability, and the warp point at Hollow Grove, I went back to the first area (Sunken Glades) and found a path leading into Black Root Burrows... This area is completely dark... I bet it's probably possible to do some sequence breaking here, but screw that, I'm not exploring this place without some kind of light source.

Oh, and now I see that the charge shot also uses up soul energy... and yeah, you can only recover soul energy from the blue gems that don't respawn very quickly... and now there's a bunch of walls that requires charged shots to destroy and I have to juggle between progressing and creating save points. Also there's doors that require you to simply deposit multiple cells of stored soul energy... which I obviously can't do anything about yet because I only have 1 energy cell capacity.


This game is getting pretty addicting now. Once I got to the Moon Grotto and got the double jump ability, the platforming suddenly got way more intense. I wasn't expecting this game to have Meat Boy style platforming difficulty all of the sudden. This is great.