Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee

My first impression of Abe's Oddysee was that nobody told it to be a normal game. Where most platformers of its era just handed you a run button and a jump, this one handed you a vocabulary. Abe can whisper "follow me" and "wait" to fellow Mudokon slaves, possess armed Slig guards with a psychic chant, sneak through shadows, roll under machinery, and even fart, which exists purely to make nearby Mudokons giggle. That last detail tells you everything about the tone: dark industrial satire wrapped around surprisingly smart, screen-by-screen puzzle logic. The structure is single-screen platforming, meaning each room is its own contained puzzle before the camera cuts to the next. You are working through RuptureFarms, a smog-belching meat-processing plant staffed by gun-toting Sligs on mechanical stilts, fleshy Slog guard dogs, and vicious Paramites that flock if they sense you grouping them. The A.L.I.V.E. creature AI gives each enemy species its own behavioral patterns, Paramites can be distracted with chunks of meat, Scrabs will turn on each other if you herd two into the same room, and possessed Sligs can order Scrabs around in ways an unpossessed Abe simply cannot. That layering is what separates this from a pure reflex game. Thinking two screens ahead, learning patrol rhythms, and figuring out whether to sneak or possess or bait an enemy into a trap is consistently satisfying when it clicks. Where the game earns its "Very Positive" Steam rating is the worldbuilding and the puzzle craft. Oddworld as a setting has a coherent, grim logic to it, a turbo-capitalist dystopia where worker exploitation is the whole operating model, delivered through pre-rendered cutscenes and ambient environmental cues rather than text dumps. The goal of rescuing all 99 fellow Mudokons adds a persistent optional pressure that rewards thorough exploration, though you only need to save 50 to reach the good ending. The whistled GameSpeak system, where different button combinations produce different spoken commands, was genuinely novel for its time and still feels tactile. The honest problem, and it is a real one for new players picking this up on Steam, is that the PC port is rough. Community feedback consistently flags screen tearing, a faster game speed compared to the original PAL release, and shaky controller mapping that may require third-party wrappers to fix. On top of that, the checkpoint system has always been unforgiving: no quick-save, sparse checkpoints, and some sections where a single mistake sends you back several screens. The pre-rendered graphics, while atmospheric, occasionally blur the boundaries of hazards and platforms in ways that cause deaths that feel unfair rather than educational. If that combination sounds like it would push you past frustration into abandoning the game, the 2014 remake Oddworld: New 'n' Tasty is the cleaner entry point to this story. But if you can tolerate the rough port conditions and the trial-and-error DNA baked into the original design, what you get is a genuinely original piece of work that still feels unlike anything else, a puzzle-platformer with a satirical bite and a world worth caring about.

Alex · Scout Team

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