Readers, it’s time to get weird.
Produced by the appropriately named Oddworld Inhabitants, Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee is the first game in its studio’s flagship series. It introduces many of the game’s major characters and sets the goofy, dark tone for which the series is known. Despite its name, it does occasionally use even numbers.
Oddworld is set in an extremely unique and, as you’d imagine, universe. It’s not a particularly happy place, however – its protagonist, Abe, is a slave in a meat processing factory who learns that he and others like him are set to be massacred. Abe’s Oddysee is, essentially, the story of his escape and the attempted liberation of his people. Despite the grim story and aesthetic, it definitely has a a lot charm to it.
The world isn’t the only thing that’s a little bit odd – unlike a lot of similar games, Oddworld has basically no GUI elements, and its hero has no health bar, inventory, or weapons. Each room of the game is, in a sense, like a puzzle that needs to be solved. Some may require a bit of stealth, while others require finding the right sequence of sneaking, running, switch pulls, and other actions to get past safely and/or rescue one or more captives. Enemies will kill you on sight, and traps are all over the place, so you need to move and act thoughtfully.
As the game progresses, Abe can gain additional helpers and powers – I won’t spoil too much of it here, but suffice it to say that the game gives you another tool or two to work with. That goes a long way to keep the game interesting, as does the novel level design and macabre humor spread throughout the game’s levels.
The number of different little things Abe can do kind of gets to the point where remembering all of the controls and be a bit of a challenge. I remember at least one instance where what I had to do was rather obvious but I couldn’t figure out the control inputs to do it. For a game that often gives very little room for error, that can lead to some dumb mistakes. The checkpoint system also plays into this, as a particularly untimely mistake, far from a checkpoint but not quite to a new one, can lead to a lot of wasted time. Aside from those criticisms, though, this is a great introduction to a great series. It also produced this loading screen:
The Oddworld series has always been reasonably well-received, but it seems to have never been a colossal success. It’s probably just a consequence of the off-kilter nature of the series, but in a world where Goat Simulator can be a smash hit, I feel like a new Oddworld could be a real hit, too. It appears there has been a game called Oddworld: Soulstorm under development for a while, though its current fate is unclear. The most recent release, a well-made remake of Abe’s Oddysee called New ‘n’ Tasty, is available on pretty much all modern platforms. An original copy of the game is pretty cheap still as well – shouldn’t run more than $10-12.
Next week’s game is one of my all-time 16-bit favorites, and an extremely worthy follow-up to this week. I hope you’ll swing in then.