At first glance, Ori seems like it's going to be something truly special. It looks great, it feels great and it has a wonderful atmosphere and tone to it. Less than an hour in however is when the cracks start to show and boy oh boy, these are some cracks. The first is it's completely broken save system. A system that requires energy to use (?!), it's also a save anywhere system. This means you can very easily get yourself into impossible and unwinnable situations relatively early in the game where you will literally be unable to progress further. The developers turned the act of saving into this bizarre meta-game for absolutely no reason. No matter how good or bad a game is, the save system is THE. ONE. SINGLE. PART. YOU. CAN. NOT. !@#$. UP! Sadly, they did indeed, and it bleeds over into every other part of the game like a terrible fart cloud covering up even the good aspects in it's stink. Second, there's a lot of cheap deaths here. Difficulty spikes are one thing (of which this game has plenty of btw) but the sheer number of instant and at times unavoidable deaths (in a game with a health system!) is borderline obscene. Combine the cheap deaths with the broken save system and you have a recipe for disaster right from the get go. I could continue pointing out issues but with just these two systems alone there's little point beating a dead horse. Ori is fundamentally flawed on it's most basic level and as a result the entire game is dragged down into the muck because of it. This game is classic example of a studio that has the resources, has the money and even has the ideas, but doesn't have the experience or the sense to put a game together properly.
The hype for this game was unreal, the only game in recent memory that reminds me of it is perhaps No Man's Sky. A lot of similarities between the two actually. Impressive tech running under the hood but little else. Bad and misleading marketing and the showing of a game that was nothing like what we actually got. Spore is a tedious and repetitive string of shallow mini-games from start to finish, nothing more. While it is indeed a novel idea and the creation tools were quite advanced for the time (eh, still are) there's no substance behind anything. The game comes across as more of a tech demo in places than an actual playable game. Spore had the potential to be one of gaming's greats, instead it stands as an embarrassing reminder of what happens when a publisher oversteps their bounds and actively screws with game development. No, Spore isn't great and even at a 12$ price tag it's still barely worth a play-through.
Just another pretentious indie game that tries way too hard to be deep. It pretends it's thought provoking, deep and complex when it's really nothing but bad writing. The very basic concepts of storytelling just don't exist here. You'll think you're playing FF13 all over again. There's not a strip of coherent dialogue to be found anywhere in the game. Within minutes of playing you'll be assaulted by nonsensical dialogue and some of the most ridiculously unbelievable characters I've ever come across in a video game. Example. You come across a woman in a dark, abandoned mine as you look for an onramp to the titular location (makes sense already doesn't it?) Instead of being completely freaked out by your presence, screaming for the police and going for a rifle she instead walks right up to your character and begins talking about how her father was killed when she was young...riiight. Your character likewise, instead of questioning the presence of this psychotic lunatic hanging around an abandoned mine at 2 in the morning proceeds to have a lovely conversation with her about television sets. That's the dialogue in a nutshell. Every person and situation you meet is so unrealistic that it killed any interest I had in the game. If you're looking for a good, solid, coherent story instead of just a bunch of artsy fluff then look elsewhere. I'm sure there's a few games on GOG where the writers actually took a writing class or two.
