Nostalgia Goggles On: Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee
While I’m always keeping an eye on the horizon for all the juicy games on their way I recently went back and sped through an old classic in just under a couple of hours. It got me thinking about the great games of yesteryear — the icons and titans, the little, nearly forgotten gems a few fans still cling to as one of the best things they ever played, and everything that ran the gamut between, be they lauded or lousy.
With this section I intend to show a bit of a retrospective on these old games that are over a decade old now. In an ideal world this would enkindle a little interest in these golden oldies, but let’s be honest it’s mostly just an excuse for me to wax poetic about some of the older games in my library.
It makes sense to me that the first game featured in Nostalgia Goggles is thereby the first game I ever played — a quirky little platformer from the 90s, Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee.
I was first introduced to this game when I was just a young child of about 4 or 5 living in rural New Zealand. We took a small holiday trip to Auckland to stay with my cousin. I don’t remember much about what we did with that trip — Auckland was a big city for a kid who lived in a much quieter place, and it still overwhelms me even now that I live in Brisbane. What I do remember of our little holiday though was that my cousin had a Playstation and on that little grey box she had a game that captured not only me but my dad and my brother too. That day was my first experience playing videogames at all, and a year or two later when I reached age 6 our family came into ownership of its own Playstation. I spent hours playing the demo of Abe’s Oddysee with it, and eventually we secured a full copy of the game. Our first completed run of the game was a collaborative playthrough between nearly the entire family, laughing at the ridiculous ways we’d screw up and die and intentionally engineering situations of sadistic slaughter… ahh, memories.
Debuting on the original Playstation in late 1997 and courtesy of developer Oddworld Inhabitants, the core premise of this 2D side-scroller surrounds an alien world named for its oddity. It is a dark place of consumerism run rampant, industrialism eclipsing the natural world in the name of profit and a corrupt race of suited executives who pull the strings from on high, cutting every possible cost in health & safety to bump up that bottom line.
The story follows titular character Abe, a member of the ‘Mudokon’ race who works as a floor waxer and model employee at Rupture Farms, a slaughterhouse and meat packing plant. When the wholesale slaughter of a number of tasty species results in a decline in said delicacies with legs, the factory ponders how it’s going to keep its profits going up in the face of a resource crisis. The solution they arrive at leaves something to be desired, it could be argued — Abe and his fellow workers will be put to death so that they can be cut up and turned into a brand new mouth-watering product!
Ignoring that they probably didn’t think that executive decision through very well, Abe promptly decides it’s time to get the hell out of dodge and makes a break for it, leading us along on a grand journey from the cold mechanical halls of Rupture Farms and out into the beautiful wilderness of Oddworld where he learns the true lineage of his enslaved brethren and overcomes the trials necessary to prove he may just be the chosen one.
Along the way players make use of the game’s biggest selling point — ‘Gamespeak’, a rudimentary form of AI commands that you see throughout many games these days, perhaps most prevalently in squad-based shooters, where effective command of your AI team is paramount to your success. Using this system the player could hold one of the shoulder buttons and then use a face button to make Abe say a phrase or make some sound (“Hello” and “Follow me” for example, as well as a few musical whistles and the dangerous game of farting on command) which would result in nearby Mudokons responding in kind. By saying hello you’d get the attention of a fellow, and by telling them to follow you the game would then become a small escort quest as you shepherded one or more workers around with you to complete puzzles or rescue them through the use of portals.
The other ability in Abe’s repertoire was the ability to chant, and by doing so build up a spiritual power that allowed him to possess foes. This power of course only worked on specific foes, namely the Sligs, the green gun-toting guards who patrolled the various areas of the game, but it meant that the environmental puzzles that needed solving could house considerable depth. Abe himself was a very fragile protagonist — no eating bullets and shrugging off gaping claw wounds — Abe would go down and stay down to just about everything that could harm him, and the player needed to account for an act accordingly. Chanting to possess a Slig was an action that took time to pull off, so if a Slig saw Abe while he was working his magic he’d take care of the problem the American way and Abe would be back to the last checkpoint to try again with less eating lead. On the other side of the equation, certain robotic foes would hover menacingly around an area, zapping the hapless hero whenever he started up a chant and disrupting his concentration with a rude (but luckily nonlethal) tazing. While possessing a foe, Abe’s body would stay exactly where you left it in a trance, which also left him incredibly vulnerable, something else the player needed to take into account when figuring out how to progress.
It all sounds complicated on paper, but in-game it comes together flawlessly, and you progress through the areas with feats of well timed athleticism often punctuated by pitfalls to stylishly launch yourself over, manipulating your co-workers into quitting their jobs through the medium of casual conversation and forcing your consciousness into the brains of the guards to shoot or blow up anything and everything in the way before vacating the mind in question via spiritual explosion.
By modern standards it’s probably a little on the short side, but allowing for the trial and error that comes with the zero tolerance policy for taking damage it’s a game that would easily clock 10 to 15 hours on a first run, with pre-rendered backgrounds that are absolutely gorgeous and a great range of environments (seriously, I’ve used in-game pre-rendered background screenshots as PC wallpaper numerous times, a claim I can only attribute to this game and some of the big RPGs of the PSOne generation) I’d recommend this game to anyone, rose-tinted glasses or no.
If anything I’ve said so far has got you interested in trying this old gem but you’re apprehensive on account of how clunky some of these oldies can be, I’ve got good news too — built from the ground up as part of a re-launch of the brand and series, “Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty” is an Abe’s Oddysee for the modern audience, every bit as good as the original but prettier, the first game’s twisted world brought back for fans and newcomers alike. It does undercut some of the “Nostalgia Goggles” factor of course, but to not mention the company’s efforts would be criminal in my opinion — that these guys are even still going after bad publisher deals and the rough patches the company experienced over the years is miraculous, testament to the tenacity of company head and Abe’s original voice actor Lorne Lanning (who’s aged incredibly well if I might add my two cents) and the many staff who work with him.
Available on the PlayStation Network as part of its PSOne classics range, you can get your digital hands on a digital copy right digital now. If you haven’t tried it I’d recommend you do that’s for sure, but it might just be the nostalgia goggles talking.
