Jeremy Plays Oddworld, Dies Inside. More at 11.

An introspective reflection on passion, self-forgiveness, and dedicated fart buttons

It’s safe to say that my life has completely transformed in the last six months. In 2020, I was unemployed and bored, so I put away over 60 games. In 2021, I have a full-time job, not to mention I now live in Florida, where it reached 100 degrees this week, and most days I just want to watch TV and sweat. The short of it is that I have less game time than I used to, which I expected. What I didn’t expect was that my drive to play anything and everything, was once hyper-strong, has dried up. Obviously, if I can’t game, I can’t blog!

Of the 17 games I’ve finished this year, most are 2-3 hours long. And the gaps between entries on the list are enormous! What’s happening to me?! Am I fading from my primary passion in this fleeting residence on planet Earth?!?!? Yeah, I don’t think it’s that dramatic, but I want to get into the meat of this blog by talking about my experience with the original Oddworld game.

In 2020, I decided to put some serious progress into my cavernous backlog. At the start of the year, I scheduled one “important” game to play each month. Over the initial quarantine, I actually pulled far ahead of my itinerary and got to play through some real classics. To contrast! I set the same plan for 2021, and by May I had yet to finish even one of my self-assigned games! And one of these games, a game I had allotted an entire month of time, was Abe’s Oddysee.

I picked up the original Oddworld games the same way I’ve acquired so much of my backlog: a random Steam discount opportunity. They were offering all four titles for like five bucks or something. You’d be stupid not to get it!! Never mind that I was unlikely to ever make it a point to buy these games otherwise. The Oddworld franchise sat in my Steam library for over two years, biding its time. Hell, Abe was even installed on my old computer for months, but I never came close to launching it. It was long overdue for a playthrough, I thought.

Before I started Abe’s Oddysee, I was looking forward to it! I heard internet opinions from people who hold the series in very high regard. Everyone knows that you can always trust internet opinions. I watched a lengthy video from Ars Technica where series creator Lorne Lanning went through its history, which I found fascinating! I finally launched the game literally months ago, not expecting to love it but to at least appreciate it. I only reached the credits yesterday. My feelings are scattershot and hard to piece together. I think that I appreciate it. But did I have fun? Would I recommend the game to you? Both answers are mostly no.

Abe’s Oddysee is technically my first “cinematic platformer.” That isn’t terribly surprising because the sub-genre is pretty sparse, and also those games tend to look kinda ugly? I don’t know, but as someone who grew up with three square Nintendo platformers a day, the focus on fluid animations and naturalistic environments is a strange sight. The PC version of this game specifically is handled pretty well, visually, but there are shortcomings. I could tell that the backgrounds are higher quality renders than the original release. There are some instances where the game “seamlessly” goes from in-game graphics to a pre-rendered cutscene transition, and these look absolutely disgusting, but that’s less than two minutes total. As for the character models, there are noticeable discolored pixels near some of their edges. It truly looks like these characters are green-screen actors composited into the shot – which is essentially true – but the keying is off, so you can see some green outline.

But in 199X, playing Abe on your PS1 off a CRT, you wouldn’t notice any of that stuff. The hazy obfuscation would let your brain become immersed in what was, at that time, one of the more detailed game worlds available. That’s where I can find some of the appreciation I do have for Abe’s Oddyssee. The port itself is over ten years old, so expecting it to look like a modern game is just silly. Still, it would be incredible if they could dig up those old models and do a true HD remaster, Double Fine style. But this game already has a faithful remake, so count that out.

The smartest thing Oddworld does is give its “collectables” humanity. The 99 Mudokons enslaved at RuptureFarms have it rough. They get beaten, shot, and exploded every five seconds. Saving them is obviously the point of the game, but your empathy makes that something you want to do. Digging around for red coins in Yoshi’s Island? There is no feasible way for me to give a crap. Leaving a Mudokon behind? Hell no! Herding these stupid creatures is finnicky and arduous more often than not, but I still felt compelled to do it. I wanted to live out my own Moses story.

So, I played through the initial RuptureFarms part of the game, making it a point to save every Mudokon I came across. Oddworld is transparent about what kind of game it is, so I went in expecting some amount of prerendered puzzley nonsense. There was a learning curve to be sure, but I was getting accustomed to the game’s mechanics and doing pretty well in my mind. Then, I got to the end of the first section, where the game told me that I had missed half of the Mudokons! If I progressed, those slaves would be murdered. How did this happen? It was time to consult GameFAQs and start over if need be.

I love the art of the FAQ for janky old games. The author typically knows the game inside and out, but little bits of attitude poke through in certain annoying moments. I’ve powered through some obtuse “classics” with the help of one of these seasoned guides. Since I do, in fact, have other things to do, the time saved is appreciated. The author of Oddworld’s FAQ is clearly a superfan because their guide is methodical.

Now, what’s the first sentence written when the player gains control? “You know this is going to be a great game when there's a secret on the very first screen!” Oh. In other words, I was doomed from the word go. Yep, this is one of those games where they want you to poke your head everywhere looking for secrets. In this instance, a barrel in the foreground obscures a ledge that takes you down, where three Mudokons wait. In my good old college try, I had missed all six of these secret areas.

Well then. This changes things. This is now officially a GameFAQs playthrough. In the game’s defense, the secrets are pretty explicitly meant for second and third runs – they ask for mechanical knowledge that you wouldn’t have initially. But there is no way on Earth that I play Oddworld more than once. I kept the FAQ tab up the whole time and crept along to make sure I didn’t miss anything. Honestly, it was a good feeling. I really don’t have patience for stupid secrets like that. But knowing what to do is only half the battle. You still have to execute.

This is a good a place as any to talk about the controls. Well… I’m not a fan of ‘em. Here’s how I think they work: When you press a button, Abe responds, but he has to play through that whole animation. It can’t be interrupted with a different input. The playable area is divided into equal units that are as wide as Abe (or any other character). Pressing right once will move Abe exactly one unit, and if you’re moving continuously, he has to stop exactly in line with that unit. Does that make any sense?

So – say you’re being chased by a fierce beast and you need to jump across a wide gap. In most platformers, the character would jump the instant the button is registered, but with the way animation works in Oddworld, the game can cruelly ignore your input if it’s not timed just right. Abe will run right off and splat into that pit. How do I know this? It happened to me at least a dozen times. The controls are built for the slower puzzle-style gameplay that comprise much of the game, but you are put in fast-paced action moments with some frequency. The game just isn’t built for them.

I am not mincing words: Oddworld is a trial-and-error game. Each room you walk into contains a multitude of heinous traps to contend with. You will be watching Abe explode hundreds of times as you internalize the one specific set of actions required to progress. That goes double for rescuing your fellow Mudokons. I’m not that angry at the design itself. I mean, that’s the game they’re making, it’s at least clear about that up front. But when that already frustrating gameplay loop is combined with unresponsive controls that lead to cheap failure, blood can boil very easily.

This would be mitigated if the game was better about saving your progress. Most of the time, I didn’t mind that checkpoints are spaced pretty far apart. But finally nailing a challenging secret room, dying on the main path, and having to go back to that secret again was a major pain in the tuchus. Trial and error, unresponsive controls, unforgiving checkpoints. Oddworld is an even more abrasive experience than I had anticipated.

While these problems are pervasive, the Oddworld itself remains compelling. The pretty basic environmental message is bolstered by strong character designs. One look at the Mudokons, Sligs, and Glukkons immediately conveys their societal structure. They’re ugly but have an intentionality that is not without appeal to me. RuptureFarms itself is presented in greater detail thanks to the wonders of compact disc technology and prerendered backgrounds. It had the potential to be one of gaming’s most iconic settings, but I have some structural issues with the game that prevents this reality.

Once Abe gets out of RuptureFarms, he putters around The Forest Moon of Endor for a few hours, doing some trials to gain new powers before returning to his former prison. The middle part of the game is where it really fell into a lull for me, and it was here that I dropped the game while I dealt with more important real-life stuff, only picking it back up many weeks later. Firstly, these environments, while maintaining strong visual design, just aren’t as exciting as the meat plant (and that Yoshi thing sucks). Secondly, it undercut much of the dramatic stakes that the game first held.

I think it was a mistake to take Abe out of the factory in the first game. True, the developers had a whole world in their heads and wanted to show it off as much as possible. There is variety from switching up locations. But for comparison, look at Half-Life. Most of the game is trying to escape from Black Mesa, but the complex is so gargantuan and houses so many facilities that a sense of progression is always maintained. Oddworld, a franchise with two feet firmly planted in fantasy, could absolutely have done the same with RuptureFarms. A factory environment lends itself to all sorts of varied areas Abe could have progressively conquered before the explosive ending. That would have preserved the threat of the Glukkons for the whole experience. Yes, Half-Life came out the year after Oddworld, but this is Imaginary Land, so I can say whatever I want.

I was seriously leaning towards not picking the game back up, but I eventually changed my mind. Surprisingly, I started enjoying the game a lot more in the last few hours, once Abe did return to RuptureFarms. I finally felt confident in the controls, or else I was spurred on by the light at the end of the tunnel. Even if secret-searching led me back through old areas, the atmosphere was so strong that I didn’t really mind. I successfully finished the game with 100 Mudokons rescued and no desire to reinstall it ever again. Abe farted at the end. Cool.

So, my time with Oddworld wasn’t as wonderful as I had hoped. But if I can learn something from the experience, that makes it worthwhile. And learn something I did. By assigning myself games to play, I made my hobby into work. And work sucks. Fighting the backlog can be a noble goal, but it’s easy to get tunnel vision and stop having fun. Slowly, I’m feeling my excitement to play games come back. And since I’ve done so poorly with my schedule so far, maybe I’ll just throw it out and play what I feel like! So, in the end, I’m glad for having finished Oddworld. And the other games in the series must be better, right?