Ori and the Blind Forest: The Metroidvania as a Watercolour

Moon Studios released Ori and the Blind Forest in 2015, a debut project from a small, geographically scattered team working largely remotely, and the game arrived looking like a concept-art book that had somehow been made playable. Hand-painted backgrounds, a luminous white- furred protagonist small enough to read as fragile against every backdrop, a forest rendered in the kind of layered, glowing detail usually reserved for animated film production art rather than a side-scrolling platformer. It would be easy to file that art direction under “prestige indie polish” and move on to the mechanics. The more useful observation is that the painterly style is doing load-bearing functional work, guiding the player through a genre — the metroidvania — that lives or dies on how legibly it can communicate traversal information without a HUD doing the job instead.

There’s no combat encounter in the whole campaign that demands the kind of pixel-precise reflexes a genre-mate action platformer would ask for either; enemies are threats to route around or Bash off, rarely gates that require mastering a punishing pattern, which keeps the difficulty curve weighted toward exploration and traversal rather than combat execution.

Colour as a traversal legend

Every metroidvania has to solve the same fundamental readability problem: a player exploring an interconnected map needs to distinguish, at a glance, between scenery, hazard, collectible and route, usually with minimal on-screen UI cluttering a genre that prizes uninterrupted movement. Ori solves this almost entirely through colour discipline rather than icons or outlines. Bounce pads, wall-jump surfaces, and elements that interact with Ori’s evolving ability set are rendered with a consistent warm glow that reads as “interactive” against the cooler, more desaturated palette of pure background scenery, a distinction the game establishes early and never breaks. Once that visual grammar is trained into you, an unfamiliar room in a late-game area becomes readable almost instantly — the eye is drawn to the glowing elements the same way it would be drawn to a lit doorway in a dark corridor, without the game needing a minimap arrow or a highlighted prompt to do that job for it.

That’s the same underlying design instinct The Metroidvania Map and the Dopamine of the Locked Door identifies as the genre’s core pleasure loop — spotting a route you can’t yet take, filing it away, and returning once a new ability unlocks it — but Ori earns that loop through art direction as much as through the ability gating itself. A player doesn’t need to consult a map screen to remember “there was a glowing wall I couldn’t climb yet” the way they might need to in a more UI-dependent metroidvania, because the visual language of what’s interactive is consistent enough to be remembered the way a real environment would be, rather than the way a menu system is.

Checkpoints, too, are handled with the same restraint as everything else: rather than fixed save points scattered through the world, Ori can spend a limited resource to place a checkpoint anywhere at will, which shifts the risk calculus of a dangerous stretch onto the player’s own judgement about when a save is worth spending, rather than leaving it to a designer’s fixed placement decisions.

Bash: a traversal tool disguised as a combat move

The game’s signature ability, Bash, lets Ori grab an enemy projectile or hostile creature mid-air and launch himself in the opposite direction of wherever he then aims it. Framed purely as combat, this reads as a serviceable but unremarkable ranged counter. Framed as traversal, which is how the level design actually uses it constantly, Bash becomes something closer to a reverse grappling hook — the only way across certain gaps is to find an enemy projectile in exactly the right position and use it as a launch platform, turning what looks like a combat encounter into the actual solution to a jumping puzzle. This dual identity is the cleverest thing in the whole ability set, because it means combat encounters and platforming puzzles stop being separate categories of challenge; a wasp’s projectile attack is simultaneously a threat to dodge and a tool to weaponise for a jump you couldn’t otherwise make, which keeps the moment-to-moment design dense without requiring a larger ability roster than the game actually has room to introduce cleanly.

The score is doing the HUD’s other job

Where colour and glow handle spatial legibility, Gareth Coker’s orchestral score handles emotional and situational legibility, shifting register clearly enough between exploration, danger and set- piece tension that a player can register a change in stakes before the screen has fully communicated it visually. That’s a meaningful design choice in a game this committed to minimal on-screen UI: without a health bar prominently displayed and without dialogue boxes interrupting movement, the score becomes one of the few remaining channels available to signal “this room is more dangerous than the last one” ahead of an enemy actually appearing on screen. Coker’s music swells ahead of the Ginso Tree escape sequence specifically to prime the player before the water starts rising, doing the anticipatory work a loading-screen warning or an on-screen prompt would handle in a less disciplined production.

A small, scattered team’s unusual pipeline

Moon Studios built the game with a team spread across several countries, collaborating largely online rather than from a single shared office, which was still an unusual production model for a debut project of this visual ambition in 2015. That distributed structure likely reinforced the game’s disciplined art direction rather than working against it: a painterly, hand-crafted visual style with a strict, consistent internal logic for what counts as interactive is exactly the kind of asset pipeline that survives a remote team well, because the rules governing colour and glow can be documented and applied consistently by artists who never share a physical office, in a way that looser, more improvisational art direction would struggle to keep coherent across that same distance.

Set pieces versus freedom, in tension on purpose

The game’s structure alternates between open, exploratory sections — the genre-standard metroidvania loop of wandering, backtracking, and unlocking new routes with new abilities — and scripted, high-velocity escape sequences where the camera pulls back, the environment starts actively collapsing behind you, and precise, memorised platforming replaces open exploration entirely. The Ginso Tree escape, where a rising wall of water chases Ori upward through a vertical gauntlet with essentially zero margin for hesitation, is the most-discussed of these, and it works as a structural gear-change specifically because the rest of the game has trained you to explore at your own pace. Yanking that agency away for a tightly scripted set piece would feel like a betrayal of the genre’s core promise if it happened often; because Moon Studios deploys it sparingly, at specific emotional and narrative peaks, it reads instead as a deliberate change of register rather than the game losing confidence in its own exploratory design.

The ability tree as a legible map of its own

Ori’s growing skill set — double jump, wall climb, the eventual glide and charge dash — follows the genre’s standard metroidvania gating logic, where new movement options retroactively unlock old areas, but Moon Studios keep the tree small enough that a player can hold the full set in their head without consulting a menu. The Metroidvania Canon treats that kind of restraint as one of the harder disciplines a genre entry can practise, because the easy failure mode is padding the ability list to justify a longer map, leaving players juggling powers they’ve half-forgotten by the time a late-game puzzle calls back to an early one. Ori mostly avoids that trap by making almost every ability do double duty, Bash being the clearest example but not the only one — the wall-climb and dash abilities are similarly reused across combat, puzzle and pure traversal contexts rather than being confined to a single application each, which keeps the total tool count low without the game ever feeling thin.

The map itself, once you do open it, follows the same restraint. Rather than a fully detailed minimap cluttered with icons, Ori’s map interface stays close to the hand-painted aesthetic of the world it’s charting, marking discovered areas and known ability gates without over-explaining them, which keeps the tool consistent with the rest of the game’s guiding principle: show enough to orient the player, and trust the environment’s own visual language to do the rest.

An opening most metroidvanias wouldn’t attempt

The game’s prologue — Ori’s adoption by the forest spirit Naru, a period of quiet companionship, and Naru’s eventual death as the forest’s blight spreads and food grows scarce — is told almost entirely without dialogue, leaning on the same painterly art direction that carries the traversal design to carry raw grief instead. It’s a sequence clearly indebted to wordless animated-film storytelling rather than typical platformer framing, and it’s a genuinely unusual choice for a genre whose openings are far more often a tutorial level dressed in minimal narrative clothing. That opening earns the rest of the game’s emotional register in a way that pure exploration and ability- gated backtracking, however well designed, wouldn’t manage alone — by the time Ori is deep into the forest’s more mechanically dense later areas, the loss that set the whole journey in motion is still present in a way most metroidvanias never bother establishing, because most metroidvanias treat their protagonist’s motivation as a premise to state rather than a loss to actually dramatise.

A 2017 sequel, Ori and the Will of the Wisps, expanded the combat considerably and refined some of the traversal further, but the original’s specific achievement — using restraint, in ability count, in dialogue, in set-piece frequency, to keep every tool the game does give you meaningfully overloaded with more than one purpose — remains the sharper design lesson of the two. It’s a smaller, tighter, more legible game than its own sequel, and the watercolour is the actual mechanism that legibility runs on, doing the navigational job a HUD would otherwise be drafted in to perform.