It seems utterly insane to me that, apparently, eighteen years have passed since I first played Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee on the original Playstation, but since the game launched in 1997, that must be the case. To put that into perspective, there are people old enough to drink in the UK who weren't born when the game first launched – and to make it scarier, those people are allowed to vote. How can you know anything about life and be considered qualified to vote if you've never played Abe's Oddysee? Fortunately, Oddworld Inhabitants have seen fit to address this and, last year, launched a beautiful HD remake of the game.
Unlike other HD remakes of recent, New 'n Tasty isn't just a graphical overhaul and spit-shine, it's a complete ground-up redesign of the game itself. The original much-beloved game has been torn to pieces and rebuilt into something to looks absolutely spectacular, yet still remains all the original's charms.
Rupture Farms in all its lethal glory.
The game follows the story of a mudokon (gangly green-skinned humanoid alien) called Abe. Abe is a worker/slave for Oddworld's largest meat processing plant, Rupture Farms, when he discovers that, in order to salvage rapidly declining profit (based on rapidly declining livestock supply), his boss is about to turn him and his mates into the next tasty marketable treat. Thus, Abe decides that now may be a good time to high tail it from Rupture Farms with as many of his mates as he can. Intro cutscene ends, game begins.
The game is a side-scrolling platformer with a difference. There's no jumping on enemies' heads here, no super spin, no collecting coins, mushrooms, rings or anything. Just you, your ability to possess enemies, throw grenades or rocks or, more usually, run for your damned life from just about everything as it tries to kill you. And believe me, everything in this game is trying to kill you. Scrabs are spears on four legs, paramites are spider-like hand-faced beasts that try to scrape your skin off, slogs are not-so-cute shaved dogs with razor sharp teeth and sligs... they're gun-totting slugs in mechanical trousers. Hey, it's called Oddworld for a reason.
When you see a scrab, you know you're going to need to run like hell.
On top of all this, you're required to rescue your chums through a clever gamespeak system. Using phrases like “Hello. Follow me! Wait!” and so on is required in order to navigate the deadly traps between the slave workers and the portals of salvation you have to lead them to. Believe me, if you want to get the good ending, you'll need to rescue every last one of them.
The thing is, due to the nature of the game, the fact that most of the game is spent running away from things that can kill you in a multitude of hilarious different ways (impaled on a scrab's nose, shot to ribbons by sligs, blasted to meaty chunks by a floating proximity mine) the game had to be twitchy. Jumps had to be timed perfectly; disarming bombs required precision timing in order to slap it off, rather than slapping a live explosive device; Abe needed to be able to turn on a coin in order to run away from the deadly thing that just dropped down in front of you. On the Playstation, this was achieved perfectly with a D-Pad, but since the gamespeak inputs are now mapped to the D-Pad, this moves onto the Left Stick, as you'd expect.
Perfect timing of your jumps is a must. If only the control scheme allowed for it.
Annoyingly, however, this doesn't translate well at all. Add to this the seemingly random nature of the controls; it took me several respawns to realise that the game wasn't bugging out on me trying to slap a bomb to disarm it, it was just the controls being randomly laggy. Running for a ledge, knowing you have to jump at the last possible moment in order to make the distance was tense and exciting in the original version, but when the game decides that it wants to delay the jump until after .you've run full-pelt off the edge of the cliff is just frustrating. Trying to compensate for this random lag by pressing the jump button early often as not results in the game deciding to actually listen to your timing sending you soaring entirely too early.
Control issues can damage a game, but rarely do they really make or break the game; when the game requires precision controls but doesn't deliver them to the player, however, it results in a frustrating, unplayable mess, which is a crying shame when the game does absolutely everything else so wonderfully. It results in a game that requires the patience of a saint in order to respawn constantly after deaths caused by seemingly random occurrences, and to keep at it long enough to miraculously succeed long enough to reach the next checkpoint.
“Tasty? Maybe slightly stale.”