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.
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 woke and cultural Marxism.