I was admittedly not a Playstation kid growing up. I have few memories of playing the original Playstation over at my cousin's house when I was small, mostly centering around playing the first couple levels of Crash Bandicoot and playing about half of the game Animorphs <Shattered Reality> because I was a dumb kid who would play anything you threw at him and I totally still don't have that game today at all. Point is, I missed out a lot on the Playstation's library growing up and now, as an adult, I'm super glad that a lot of the cool things I missed out on are getting remade for the Playstation 4 so I can experience what I didn't as a kid because I was too obsessed with Pokemon to worry about anything else. And, so far, one of my better experiences has been with the HD remake of the very first Oddworld game, Abe's Oddysee.
Oddworld is a 2.5D sidescrolling puzzle platformer because, like, why just settle on one genre when you can be ALL the genres. In it, you take control of Abe, an average guy working as a janitor at a major food corporation, RuptureFarms. One day, Abe discovers that the head of RuptureFarms is intending on unveiling that their next big food item will be made out of Mudokon, the species Abe is a part of, and he decides very quickly that he must escape RuptureFarms, hopefully taking as many of his fellow Mudokons with him. Can Abe save his fellow man? I mean, I already beat the game so I know that answer is yes, don't know why I'm playing coy with all of you.
I have to admit, I wasn't super into the world of Oddworld when I was first playing it. I initially played all the way through the first section, the Escape from RuptureFarms, long before I played through anything else when I first purchased the game last year. I thought the puzzle design was really well handled, but the character of Abe was grating on me initially and I wasn't huge on the environment. I'm a little sick of dystopia, honestly. So I was cautious when it came up on the cookie early this year. But I strapped myself in, decided that no matter what I was going to beat this game and was very pleasantly surprised.
See, after you get past the first RuptureFarms section, you go to the native land of the Mudokon people and Oddworld quickly goes from being a dark, desolate place that you're attempting to escape from to a bright, colorful, varied world with some pretty interesting lore. We learn that the Mudokon are a deeply spiritual people who used to worship the land that they stand on, building large temples to its creatures. Abe is then sent on a mission to both of these temples to gain the true power of his people, in the hope that he may be able to break back into RuptureFarms and save all the rest of the Mudokon trapped inside. And while this is admittedly horribly cliche, the change in goal and in scenery was enough to keep me invested enough to finish the game.
Oddworld is what I like to call a 'Lemmings' puzzler. Abe uses vocal commands to communicate with his fellow Mudokons who will follow his every action basically one-to-one. Your goal in most puzzles is to use these vocal commands to lead your fellow lemmings to the safety of the magical bird portals, that Abe can then use his Chant ability to open. You'll, of course, have to do this while navigating enemies, traps and the game's sometimes clunky controls. It's a simple puzzle idea that the game expands upon greatly, creating many fun, clever and all around complicated puzzles for you to test your skills in. And die. A lot.
Going into my playthrough a little more, I'm pretty sure I died on every puzzle at least once and while I'll admit, a lot of it was my fault for just bad playing, some of it gets into Oddworld's real problems. Oddworld has too steep of a learning curve and far too many unclear puzzles, which could potentially turn off newer players to what is otherwise a really fun game. It's the kind of game that'll show you how to do a mechanic once, like, say, sneaking, and then instantly expect you to do long and complicated puzzle sections entirely while sneaking. This is made even more frustrating by the fact that Oddworld appears to have an issue with input lag. Several sections require precision platforming and often times I found the game wasn't taking my button inputs fully on time so I'd miss jumps and fall into pits or get shot by enemies or eaten or any of the other hundred ways to die in this game.
But, I persevered and I was glad I did. Oddworld is a fun, challenging and rewarding puzzle game and I highly recommend it if you own a Playstation and are looking for just a super fun, super weird game to play. It was a wonderful way to start off the 52 and, hopefully, a good sign for how this year turns out. I hope you enjoyed this read, please leave comments to tell me how I can improve and I'll see you next time when we catch up on the second game of the 52, Strider.
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