Strikingly Good Level Design: ‘Ori and the Will of the Wisps’ Impressions

Ori and the Will of the Wisps has strikingly good world design. In my 15 hours with the game thus far, I’ve worked mercilessly toward seeing each and every corner of what Will of the Wisps has to offer. Side quests are tucked away in small, intimately designed spaces – like tiny fishing ponds or huts hidden in the trees. New abilities can be found in hard-to-reach spots that require skilled platforming.

The game does a really nice job of making these efforts worth your while, with a strong mix of intrinsically motivated resolutions, like slaying a wolf and returning one of its teeth to a little creature who wants to be able to brag about his bravery to friends, and extrinsically motivated resolutions, like a heap of XP that can be used on new abilities. And if that isn’t enough, Will of the Wisps did everything it could to make me want to set my eyes on its magnificent art design. 

More so than just about any game on the planet, Will of the Wisps is beautiful to look at. It perfectly melds a naturalistic design, with pop-off-the-screen colors and lighting, as well as strong platforming. It did take me a little while to adapt, since it all blends together pretty seamlessly. For instance, there is a very subtle difference between vines Ori can grab onto and those that are just there for aesthetic purposes. It’s almost the antithesis of something like Hollow Knight, which distinguishes its world with sharp contrast between things you can and cannot interact with. Similarly, Ori is really, really small. Especially when scaled with some of the immense backgrounds, creatures, and particle effects, it’s easy to lose track of where Ori is. I’ve had several deaths that can be attributed to losing track of where Ori is in the midst of everything. 

Wonderfully Diverse

One advantage to the vastness of its design is that Will of the Wisps is wonderfully diverse. One area in particular, the ‘Luma Pools’, pops with pinks, purples and blues. Bubbles surface from the bottom of its many ponds, and Ori can use them to bound upward, streams of fast-moving water prevent Ori from progressing without a special ability, and blue orchids that Ori can dash off of hang from the ceiling. Meanwhile, the whole thing looks like a dream through the lens of a kaleidoscope. It’s a wonderful blend of artistic design and platforming design. 

Unfortunately, in my time with Will of the Wisps on Xbox One X,, there have been a number of performance issues. The game runs at 4K, 60 frames per second with high-dynamic range (HDR) but there are lots of painful stutters and freezes – especially when entering a new area of leaving the pause menu. This is particularly unfortunate because, as mentioned, Will of the Wisps is intricately designed and required me to open up the map quite a bit. Even worse, there were instances where entire platforming elements would not load in.

For half an hour, I thought I was stuck in a particular area until I reloaded the game. I’ve also seen plenty of smaller enemies get stuck in areas they shouldn’t be stuck and Ori get jammed into corners with no way out. While I’m painfully close to 100%’ing the game, I’m already sad that my time with Ori and the wondrous cast of characters that surround him is coming to an end. There are so many more things to talk about, including one of my favorite hub areas in recent memory, a handful of delightfully tough boss fights, and a light-swallowing section of the game that is as brutal as anything I’ve played in some time. For more, check back in a couple of weeks for our full review on Ori and the Will of the Wisps.

For more Ori and the Will of the Wisps, check out our full review later this month. Thank you for reading. Your Patreon support keeps our community entirely Ad free.