Ori and the Blind Forest

Moon Studios' 2015 debut is a hand-painted Metroidvania with a fourteen-person team behind it and production values that embarrassed studios ten times the size. The forest of Nibel is dying, and Ori's route through it opens as abilities arrive: double jump, wall climb, and Bash, the ability that defines the game - grabbing a projectile or an enemy mid-air, aiming, and launching yourself off it in the opposite direction. Bash turns hazards into transport, and the late-game platforming is built almost entirely around chaining it. Combat is the weakest element, a homing spirit flame that mostly aims itself, and the game knows to keep it brief. What it does instead is escape sequences: three timed chases with the water, the wind and the lava that are the sequences everyone remembers, and are hard enough to have generated a genre of frustration videos. Gareth Coker's score and Ori's save-anywhere system round out a game that is short, precise and largely without filler.