The Windswept Wastes in Ori and the Will of the Wisps

While this part of the map was the last one that I went to of the 3 Wisps that you have to gather to progress, you can approach them in any order. The only issue you will face is that at the end of this path, you will not be able to open the door at the end until you get all of the Wisps, so it kind of makes sense to go to this one last. It is also IMO, harder than some of the others because of environmental dangers, but I have seen it done on other people's channels.

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_{that, my friends is conceptual art of the region before the game was ever made...pretty cool huh?}

This is the area you get to after you pass the Shriek stealth area and it is pretty nice that they put a savegame and warp point right at the start. It would be a real pain to have to go through the stealth section every time you want to visit here and it also wouldn't make much sense in a story sense that Shriek would always be waiting there for you even after he discovered you.

This area offers some unique challenges that are probably going to get you a few times before you get past them. The most notable thing that got me a few times was these platforms that are some sort of venus fly trap that doesn't kill you outright, but it will hurt you and sometimes annoyingly bump you and make you fall to a lower area.

You can see one of them on the top there, right above these pretty tanky but not that difficult to defeat monsters that blocks your path. You can simply jump over most of them, but it's kind of fun to fight them. If you latch onto the grappling point above and linger for more than a second or so, it will close on you, damage you, and then throw you below where the baddy is waiting to club you a bit. So don't do that.

Something else that might get you a couple of times are these dusty looking platforms that you must use to gain access to what is above most of them but they disappear almost immediately on contact. They literally crumble to dust and you need to jump immediately upon landing on them.

I was mad button mashing a lot of the time but after a few falls I figured out that I need a strategy before I ever even jump on them.

There's some pretty tricky platforming in here such as the two crumbling dust things that you have to jump from one to the next very quickly in order to get up top. This is why it can be kind of important to kill the tanky mobs that are placed here. If you eliminate them, falling doesn't have much consequence. You will just need to try again straight away without a fight.

You will encounter a lot of these sand walls that you may have seen in other places in the map as well and you can't get through them...yet. It shouldn't be that much of a surprise that the ability that allows you through them is something you get in this area and that is why there is so much of them here.

some of the platforming here might test your patience because your "launch point" at the far right, when you are standing there, doesn't allow you to see far enough in the distance to actually know what you are going to have to do once you get there. Because of all the spikes on the ground this can be a real drain on your health which if you went here first, you aren't going to have very much of.

Thankfully the auto-checkpoint system in this game is very forgiving and should you fall and die, it will restart you right at the start of this one section.

In fact, there are very few spots in this entire game that death means a long path back to try again and I applaud the developers for making the game this way.

You can make this portion, as well as most platforming portions in the entire game a lot more easy by enabling "triple jump" in your optional skills (whatever they are called). That has been a real perk for my progress. Sure, it's just one more jump, but that makes a world of difference in sticky situations like this.

Once you get I would say, about halfway through the level, you will get the burrow ability which now allows you to go through those sand walls you have been seeing so much of up to this point. Now you have the option of going back to see what is behind the walls in all of those spots or you can just carry on forward to the main objective.

I'm not going to spoil the boss in this just yet, because there is still a lot of level left to go.

While I think this level could be seen as "too hard" to someone that comes here first, I do like the fact that anytime you ever encounter that in this game you always have the ability to warp out of here and come back later. I once again want to praise the developers for having this as an option in the game because this is a real pain in a lot of metroidvania games and the lack of this ability is the reason why I have abandoned so many of this type of game in the past.

This is just another absolutely outstanding section of this game that has made it one of my favorite games of the past 10 years. It may actually be on my top 10 or 15 of all time.

It isn't heavily discounted on anything and it is not available at all on Playstation. It isn't often that I advise people to pay $30 for a game, but this is one of them.

I'm playing on Nintendo Switch, but it is also available on Xbox and PC.

_{all non credited images are from my own gameplay}