Gorgeous platformer Ori and the Blind Forest gets new gameplay

Ori and the Blind Forest’s first mission has been released as part of this year’s Tokyo Game Show. This latest video shows us how Ori falls into the forest and is adopted by a bear-like creature who raises Ori as her child. Needless to say, the game looks absolutely stunning, and its soundtrack is as peaceful as its environments (well, in the beginning, at least).

After the bear-like creature takes Ori in, a malevolent entity, Kuro, appears and takes Ori’s mother from him, forcing Ori to explore the forest on his own. Initially, Ori is very weak and can only jump about. During the game, Ori meets Sein, who will both guide Ori on his adventure and attack enemies. As the player gains experience, they may choose new abilities for Ori and Sein, allowing Ori to explore more of the game world. In addition to save points scattered in the game, players can create ‘soul links’ at any time they choose to serve as checkpoints. However, soul links can only be created using special resources collected during gameplay; the needed resources are not in abundant supply, forcing players to create them only when necessary.

Ori and the Blind Forest is being developed by Moon Studios, a worldwide collaboration of designers and programmers who have been working on the game for the past four years, with Microsoft acquiring the game about a year after development started. The core components of the game story have not been revealed, although the designers say they were guided by works such as The Lion King and The Iron Giant and that it would be a “coming-of-age story”. The art style is meant to appear hand-drawn, similar to the more recent Rayman titles that utilize Ubisoft’s ‘UbiArt’ graphics engine; the game instead uses the Unity engine.

Ori and the Blind Forest launches sometime this fall on the Xbox One and PC, while an Xbox 360 version is planned for 2015.