Rating: CLASSIC
I first played Abe’s Oddysee on a demo disc that came with the original PlayStation. The demo showcased almost the entire first section of the game, which I played through several times before buying the full game—and its sequel, Abe’s Exoddus—sometime around the year 2000. For the most part, the game has aged excellently, and the towering walls of Rupture Farms are just as impressive to me now as they were when I was a child.
Abe’s Oddysee is a 2D platformer set on the alien planet of ‘Oddworld’. You are Abe, a Mudokon slave working in a meat processing facility called Rupture Farms. Working late one night, Abe discovers that his bosses are planning to turn their Mudokon ‘employees’ into meat products, having already driven the local fauna to near extinction. Horrified, he tries to escape while saving as many of his fellow Mudokons as possible.
Oddworld genuinely feels like a dark and dangerous place, due to some great art, sound design and environmental story-telling. The guards of Rupture Farms casually beat the slaves on their rounds, surveillance orbs float around ready to zap misbehaving workers, and Mudokon corpses hang in barbed wire fences on the outskirts of the factory. Most of the gameplay involves navigating deadly obstacles and the trigger-happy guards, while also helping Mudokons escape into portals. However, far from feeling too gloomy or oppressive, the game is balanced out with a humourous goofiness that keeps the experience highly enjoyable. Abe can issue simple commands (“Wait”, “Follow me”, etc.) to guide his highly suggestible colleagues through the danger. He is also able to possess the armed guards and trick them into fighting each other, though he leaves himself vulnerable while doing so.
Abe’s Oddysee does a lot with a little, in gameplay as well as narrative content. Early in the game, we learn of the native creatures brought to the brink of extinction by Rupture Farms—later on, Abe travels outside the factory to interact with these creatures. The alien guards make strange clicking sounds, which are later used to open password-protected locks. A simple rock-throwing mechanic is used throughout the game for a variety of different purposes. It’s also quite significant that the game has no HUD of any kind. Important information is delivered entirely through diegetic means, allowing for greater immersion and smoother tutorials than even some modern games.
The main problem with the game is the difficulty. Death is always just one mistake away for Abe and his unfortunate co-workers. Maybe you didn’t quite jump in the exact right spot; maybe boulders fell unexpectedly from the sky and crushed you; maybe a guard decided to turn around a little earlier than usual. It is very easy for Abe and his friends to die, and it doesn’t always feel fair when it happens. Combined with some imperfect checkpointing, this means that there is a lot of tedious trial-and-error, and re-execution of already solved puzzles. The game’s sequel, Abe’s Exoddus, effectively fixes this problem by allowing the player to quicksave, among many other things. I’m thankful that Abe’s Oddysee at least gives the player unlimited lives, unlike many other old platforming games.
I replayed this game recently, and was shocked at the placement of some of the tutorial information. The first time the player is taught how to mind control the guards is very far into the game, well after that mechanic becomes important. In fact, the game doesn’t bring this up explicitly until a section of the game outside the factory, where guards are much scarcer! Of course, there is nothing to stop a player from stumbling across this helpful mechanic during the first parts of the game, as I did when messing around in the demo as a child. It is still strange that this information is held back for so long after it becomes useful.
Coming up on its 20th birthday, Abe’s Oddysee still compares decently with a lot of modern games. What it lacks in friendliness, it more than makes up for in atmosphere and cool gameplay mechanics. Abe’s Exoddus is even better in many ways. It builds on its predecessor without losing any of the original charm—unlike the awkward move to 3D in Munch’s Oddysee, the third Oddworld game. But that, as they say, is another story.