Ori and the Blind Forest: Definitive Edition

I am on a bit of a metroidvania stint recently after Hollow Knight/Silksong, and Ori was next on my roster. It's no Dark Souls, but I don't think every metroidvania needs to be. Honestly, if it wasn't for some pretty intense escape sequences, I'd say the game is the perfect metroidvania for younger kids to get into, but still engaging enough for adults to enjoy, and that's a great thing -- games like these are great ways to introduce the genre to the younger audience. As for those escape sequences, I personally found them to be frustrating to the point of annoying. I love some good parkour, but there were no check points and the camera kinda moves slowly at times, I think to cinematically highlight stuff that is happening (often behind you, from whatever you are running away from), so you can't necessarily see what's coming all that well. The foreground/background elements can also get confusing (for me at least), so it's hard to understand what will kill me and what won't during those sequences. It ultimately ended up being a lot of death loops as I slowly got a little further each time, died to a mechanic that I didn't know was coming, over and over until the whole sequence was memorized and could be done in one go. This all being said, I'd still give the game a solid 8/10 at least. Lovely music, beautiful artwork, touching story, engaging mechanics and decent (if somewhat simplistic) combat. I'm assuming the in-game timer is paused, as my save file says I have 11 hr 30 min but Steam says I've played for 17 hours at the time of this review (and it's my only save file). I got 100% completion on the save file, though I'm missing a few achievements (mostly ones related to killing enemies in unique/tricky ways, as well as speedrun/hardmode/etc achievements). I enjoyed it enough that I could easily see myself revisiting at some point to try and get those remaining achievements, but for now it's on to the 2nd Ori game and the rest of my very long list of games to play!