The worldbuilding, visual design, and dark humor are so good. I love the tricky cinematic platformer gameplay too, it's a series of great little puzzle boxes where every interaction has a reaction with the enemy or environment and figuring out how to manipulate perfectly it in one go (through countless fuck ups and deaths) is super satisfying and there's such a breadth of interactions that there's a surprising amount of freedom in how to approach a situation
Not a personal fan of puzzle games that features trial-and-error and lots of dying.
The cinematics, art direction, and gameplay have all aged like wine - even if the difficulty has not. Checkpoints are sparse and setbacks are brutal, especially if you're a completionist. While it may hurt to play a lot more than its refined sequel, the tone and stakes of Abe's first story always keep me coming back.
Awesomeness: The Game
Loved it!! I've had this game (including most of the other games in the series) since I was a kid, but I never got past the first level back then. I love the world. It's quite "odd" to say the least. The puzzles are great and when you get the hang of them, they feel so satisfying to complete. They could sometimes be annoying though, and it became frustrating to do some levels over and over again because of one tiny section that was hard to get the hang of. I love Abe and the other mudokons, they are all so adorable.
Loved it!! I've had this game (including most of the other games in the series) since I was a kid, but I never got past the first level back then. I love the world. It's quite "odd" to say the least. The puzzles are great and when you get the hang of them, they feel so satisfying to complete. They could sometimes be annoying though, and it became frustrating to do some levels over and over again because of one tiny section that was hard to get the hang of. I love Abe and the other mudokons, they are all so adorable.
While I prefer Exoddus, this one is still heaps of fun and one of my childhood favourites despite its shortcomings compared to its sequel.
I miss the good old days of the 90s, when games weren’t so political. Where you could play a game like Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee, about a meek worker class of aliens exploited by a ruling class for its labor, their culture erased by their employers to enforce their enslavement, to produce commodities and surplus value at an exponential rate destructive and self-consuming enough to that ruling class that they choose to make their next big commodity be the very flesh of that exploited work force themselves, until one hero alien is inspired to foment collective action against their capitalist oppressors, where he is encouraged to be as non-selfish as he possibly can and his very survival is determined by how many of his fellow workers he can rescue rather than merely escaping by himself. Nowadays you can’t look anywhere without being exposed to a bunch of wokeism and cultural Marxism.