Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus

I came into Exoddus having already bounced off Oddysee twice, put off by the way a single missed jump could erase twenty minutes of careful Mudokon herding. The quicksave system here changed everything. Hit a key, plant your own checkpoint anywhere on any screen, and suddenly the trial-and-error logic that defines this game's puzzle design becomes something you can actually wrestle with instead of dread. It sounds like a small quality-of-life tweak. In practice it transforms the experience from punishing to genuinely absorbing. The core loop is a 2D screen-by-screen puzzle-platformer where Abe himself cannot fight. His toolkit is GameSpeak (barked one-word voice commands to control and direct Mudokons), spirit possession, stealth through shadows, and the odd rock or bone chucked at a trap. What Exoddus adds on top of Oddysee's foundation is substantial: possession now extends to flying Sligs with grenade launchers, territorial Scrabs you can pit against each other, pack-hunting Paramites, and even Glukkons, whose industrial authority lets you order Sligs around without raising suspicion. New enemy types like the motion-detecting Greeter robots and the double-headed Fleeches require entirely different approaches. There are also 300 Mudokons to rescue across locations including Necrum Mines, Bonewerkz, Slig Barracks, and Feeco Depot, and the ending you get depends on how many of them make it out alive. Clearing the good ending legitimately, without a guide, is a real undertaking. The Mudokon management got a meaningful overhaul too. Sad, angry, blind, and laughing-gas-addled Mudokons each need handling differently before they will cooperate, and the "All o' ya" group command means you can move a whole cluster at once rather than shuttling them one by one. It sounds fiddly on paper and occasionally is, but when a screen clicks and half a dozen freed workers funnel into a bird teleporter behind you it feels genuinely satisfying. The production values still impress: pre-rendered 2D backgrounds with hand-animated 3D characters, cutscenes that are more elaborate and story-driven than the original, and Lorne Lanning voicing almost every creature in the game. The honest criticisms are real but narrow. The game was assembled in nine months under publisher pressure, and some players feel the indoor-heavy level design trades Oddysee's eerie outdoor atmosphere for a more mechanical, factory-to-factory momentum. The dual-ending structure incentivizes going back for every hidden Mudokon, which can feel like an obligatory checklist grind if you are not already invested in the world. And if you lean hard on quicksave as a crutch on every single screen, you can dilute the puzzle tension yourself. The game is better when you resist that temptation except on genuinely punishing stretches. For players who bounced off Oddysee, this is the better entry point. For players who finished Oddysee and loved it, this is a larger, more mechanically rich continuation of the same ideas. The 95% positive rating on Steam across over 1,600 reviews is not nostalgia padding; the design holds up. Just be prepared for a game that expects you to read the environment carefully, fail a few times, and think laterally rather than react quickly.

Alex · Scout Team

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