Ori and the Will of the Wisps

Moon Studios announced the sequel at E3 2017, three years before it shipped. When Ori and the Will of the Wisps finally landed on March 11, 2020, for Windows and Xbox One, it arrived with a longer, denser campaign than Ori and the Blind Forest and a combat system the first game never had. A Nintendo Switch port followed in September 2020, handled through Iam8bit, and an optimized Xbox Series X/S build shipped as a launch title for those consoles that November.

The setting shifted to Niwen, a forest with its own wildlife, ruins and creeping rot. Moon Studios rebuilt the visual pipeline too, trading the layered hand-painted 2D of the original for 3D models rendered against multilayered backgrounds. The watercolor look survived; the sense of depth did not exist before. Gareth Coker returned to score it.

Reviews were strong across the board, with critics pointing at the story, the animation, the soundtrack and the reworked combat. Launch week brought frame rate drops and visual glitches that a day-one patch largely cleaned up. The ESRB handed it an E10+ for fantasy violence and mild scary moments, which is about right for a game where the emotional damage does more work than the enemies. [edit]

Ori moves through Niwen like water finding a drain. Wall-climbs, glides, dashes and grapples chain together with almost no friction, and the escape sequences that made the first game famous return with more going on screen. What changed most is the fighting. Instead of leaning on the Spirit Flame projectile, Ori now carries spirit weapons and spells, and the new shard system lets you slot modular upgrades to shape a build around damage, defense or mobility.

It is still a Metroidvania underneath all that. New abilities unlock gated routes and open shortcuts back through zones you already crossed, and the map fills in as you push deeper. Boss fights sit on the critical path, while side quests and collectibles reward wandering off it. Reviewers kept coming back to the movement itself, which is the thing the sequel does better than almost anything else in its genre. [edit]

Naru and Gumo raise the owlet Ku alongside Ori, and a flight gone wrong drops the family into Niwen. Ku is separated from the group, and the forest is sick, its creatures turning strange as decay spreads. Ori sets out to find her. The storytelling stays nearly wordless, carried by animation and Coker's score rather than dialogue, and that restraint is a large part of why the ending lands the way it does. [edit]