Ori and the Will of the Wisps: The Sequel That Grew Teeth

Moon Studios released Ori and the Blind Forest in 2015 to a genuinely strange complaint: the platforming was superb, the world was gorgeous, and the combat was the weakest part of the package, a scatter of spirit-flame projectiles fired at enemies that mostly existed to be avoided rather than fought. Five years later, Ori and the Will of the Wisps (2020) answers that complaint directly, and the answer is a combat system built almost from nothing: a sword, a hammer, a bow, a launcher, a spike-dash charge attack, each unlocked through the same Spirit Light economy that used to buy only movement upgrades. That’s the whole story of what separates this sequel from its predecessor — Moon Studios didn’t just add a bigger map, they went back and fixed the one system that was carrying the rest of the design on its back.

The Spirit Edge changes what a fight is for

In the first game, an enemy encounter was an obstacle to clear so you could get back to the platforming, which was the actual point. In Will of the Wisps, the Sword Charge, Hammer Slam and Spike combo give Ori enough reach and knockback control that a fight becomes its own small puzzle of positioning — do you clear the ground threat first or take the aerial one while it’s still winding up its attack. The Spirit Shards system, small passive modifiers slotted into a fixed number of sockets, does the same soft-constraint work Team Cherry’s charm system does in Hollow Knight: a shard for faster energy regeneration reads completely differently against Howl Den’s flooded caverns than it does against the Silent Woods’ stealth sections, and swapping the loadout at a save statue costs just enough friction to make the choice feel considered rather than free.

None of this replaces the platforming, which is still the reason to play. The Sein-guided abilities — Light Burst, Spirit Flame, and the returning Bash that lets Ori redirect projectiles and enemies mid-air as a traversal tool — remain the design’s real signature, and the game keeps finding new environmental hazards to make Bash feel freshly clever rather than merely repeated. What’s new is that combat finally earns its screen time instead of interrupting the platforming that used to be the only thing worth caring about.

Shrines and the difficulty the first game refused to have

Will of the Wisps adds combat Shrine trials — timed, wave-based arenas that strip away exploration entirely and ask you to prove the sword and bow work under pressure, not just against wandering mobs. They’re optional, sensibly, because they’re a different kind of game from the exploration Moon Studios built its name on, but their existence signals a studio confident enough in its new combat system to let players stress- test it in isolation. The first Ori never had anything like this because it didn’t need to; the combat wasn’t good enough to survive being isolated and examined. That the sequel is willing to put its fighting under a spotlight is the clearest evidence the redesign worked.

Ginso Tree’s flooding escape from the first game gets an equivalent here in the Willow’s Path collapse and the Baur’s Reach owl chase, both scripted sequences that strip the player of the pause-and-plan pace the rest of the game runs at and replace it with a single unbroken sprint. They’re divisive among longtime fans for exactly that reason — a chase sequence punishes hesitation in a game otherwise built around careful traversal puzzles — but they work as tonal punctuation, the moments where Moon Studios reminds you that Niwen’s beauty sits directly on top of real danger.

Kwolok’s Hollow and the value of a hub that lies still

The escort-and-hub structure around Kwolok, Baur and Grom — three named NPCs whose personal stakes double as gates to new abilities — replaces the first game’s largely uninhabited forest with something closer to a small, recurring cast, and it’s a genuine gamble for a series that made its name on wordless environmental storytelling. It mostly pays off because none of the three characters overstays their welcome or turns into an exposition faucet; Grom’s Wellspring Glades questline resolves in under an hour of play and never repeats a beat. The risk with adding named, speaking characters to a series built on Another World-style visual storytelling is diluting what made it distinctive, and Moon Studios avoids that by keeping every conversation short enough that Sein’s Light and the painted backgrounds are still doing more of the emotional work than the dialogue is.

Wellspring Glades doubles as the game’s answer to a town hub, and it’s worth noting how little it actually asks of the player compared with a typical Metroidvania save-point network. There’s no shop economy to grind, no currency sink competing for attention with the Spirit Light upgrade tree; the few trades Grom offers exist purely to advance his own small arc, not to gate the player behind a resource treadmill. That restraint matters more than it looks like on paper, because it keeps the hub feeling like a place rather than a menu, and it’s a discipline plenty of games twice this one’s budget don’t bother with.

The map’s second currency

Ori Sun Fragments and Spirit Light aren’t the only resources at work — the Map Fragments Moki sells at Wellspring Glades effectively gatekeep the minimap itself, region by region, which is a small but pointed design choice in a genre that usually hands over full cartography for free. Buying a fragment doesn’t just reveal geography; it reveals which Shard slots, health cells and energy cells are still hiding in a completed area, turning the map screen into an active to-do list rather than a passive reference. It’s a lighter-touch version of the same “I remember there was something here” pull that drives the Metroidvania genre generally, and pairing it with Moki’s fast-travel spirit wells gives backtracking a purpose instead of making it a tax on completionists.

The score as a fourth traversal system

Gareth Coker’s orchestral score, performed with a full ensemble rather than sequenced, deserves more credit than “atmospheric” reviews usually give it, because it’s doing structural work: cues shift half a beat ahead of a platforming sequence’s difficulty spike, telegraphing danger before the level geometry does. The Baur’s Reach chase sequence works as well as it does partly because the score accelerates into it before Ori’s feet do, priming a player’s reflexes a half-second early. Strip the music out of a recorded playthrough and the same sequence reads as noticeably harder to read — evidence that Moon Studios treats sound design as a traversal aid, not decoration laid over the top afterwards.

Where the difficulty argument gets tested

Not everything Moon Studios added survives contact with the rest of the design. The escort sequences built around Baur — a wounded bear the player half-guides, half-follows through a collapsing cave — are the weakest addition in the game, because Baur’s pathing occasionally stalls against geometry that reads as passable, forcing a restart of an otherwise scripted sequence for a reason that has nothing to do with player skill. It’s a minor complaint set against everything the combat rework gets right, but it’s the one place the sequel’s ambition outran its testing budget, and it’s worth naming precisely because the rest of the game is disciplined enough that the rough edge stands out. The Luma Pools upgrade tree also front-loads its most interesting choices — the double-jump-adjacent Light Burst, the parry-timed Bash refinements — early enough that the back third of the skill tree feels like incremental stat padding rather than new verbs, a shape the first game avoided by simply having fewer nodes to spend Spirit Light on.

The ancestor

Both Ori games wear their Metroid lineage on the surface — ability- gated backtracking, a wordless protagonist, a hostile-beautiful world map — but the closer ancestor for the specific feel of Bash-chained traversal is Rayman Origins and Legends, games Moon Studios’ founders have cited directly as the model for hand-painted, physics-forward platforming before a single ability gate was designed. What Will of the Wisps adds to that lineage is the willingness to let combat share the stage with movement rather than sit beneath it, which is the one thing neither Rayman nor the first Ori fully committed to. It’s also worth setting against Gris, a contemporary that solved the same “beautiful platformer, thin combat” problem by removing combat entirely rather than rebuilding it — two answers to the same design question, arrived at by two different studios within a few years of each other, neither one wrong.

The verdict

Will of the Wisps is the rare sequel that identifies its predecessor’s one real weakness and rebuilds around it rather than simply expanding the map and calling it a day, and the combat overhaul is thorough enough that replaying the original afterwards feels like stepping back into an early draft. The chase sequences will frustrate players who came for contemplative traversal, and the new NPC cast is a bet that doesn’t suit everyone who loved the first game’s silence, but neither undercuts what the Spirit Edge and Spirit Shards get right. It’s on PC, Xbox, PlayStation and Switch, and the map density holds up on all of them, with the Switch port in particular running a noticeably steadier frame rate than the same studio’s 2015 debut managed on the same hardware three generations earlier. If Hollow Knight is the Metroidvania that trusts silence to carry characterisation, this is the one that proves a painted forest can also throw a decent punch, and the fact that Moon Studios shipped both the redesign and a bigger cast of speaking characters without losing what made the first game distinctive is the harder trick, done quietly enough that it barely reads as a risk in hindsight.

Spoilers below

The Willow’s Path sequence, where the Owl Kuro’s shadow, Shriek, pursues Ori through a collapsing tree in real time with no checkpoints mid-chase, is the game’s hardest scripted set piece and the one most likely to end a first-time run in frustration rather than triumph. Shriek’s backstory — an owl who lost her own chicks and projects that grief onto hunting Ori — gives the antagonist a motive the first game’s Kuro never got space for, and the eventual truce between Ori and Shriek, rather than a straightforward boss kill, is the clearest sign Moon Studios wanted this sequel’s climax to resolve through empathy rather than combat, even after building an entire combat system to get there. The closing shot, Ori watching a new light spirit hatch as Niwen’s forest finally stabilises, plays as a direct visual echo of the first game’s ending, and it’s a deliberate one: the sequel argues that recovery is cyclical, not a single completed arc.