I very well understand the desire to love this game; games made with a perpendicular design ethos, especially when we judge them historically and with hindsight both considered in their reckoning, have a scrappy and unknowable quality which enliven the literal remarkability of their note, forcing all discussion to do away with obvious comparison and referential demarcation to their states of play, instead matching our experiences with a pure interactive discussion of the object and not with the object’s parallel ephemera. To talk about any shooter from the 90s is to talk about DOOM; to talk about any WRPG from the 2000s is to talk about Bioware; to talk about Another World we must use a different language - a wine dark mention of the sea - than we would to talk about Super Mario World, which would be to talk about platformers from the 2D era. The way AW used the ideas of what traversing a landscape environment was so fundamentally different than what the dominant idea of the genre in that era was, and still mostly remains as today even in the indie explosion era, denies the ability to examine it in familiar terms to our games criticism vernacular of the type. If that is a merit, then the game is hugely meritorious. But if that is a merit, a sky blotting grandeur even, it is the game’s sole merit, for even without qualifying it by the successes of other platformers, the game is an utter failure on all criteria we can bring to it in the comparative form.

These are the only words I will say about the play: It is a turgid, septic slog every step of the way, buried under clay spent decades in its forming since release, fossilizing whatever input it has, bandied with cardboard and string, that might have worked at the time (I should say I played the 20th anniversary version, a version that should never have been released without a massive overhaul of the game’s play); in the present, it now sits buried under concrete of such an under-thought, ill conceived, beautifully marvellous ineptitude of design for all actions allowed to the player that I can at this very impressionable moment of criticism come to believe that we have moved from monkeys at typewriters penning Hamlet to monkeys at Commodore 64s coding software. Even to walk, just pressing left or right on the D-Pad, rewards with such a tiresome animation, lifeless in feel or character expression and worthless in navigation of hard system puzzle solving and soft system world ingratiation, is something which in this lackless game is more taxing than most masochist quest drips, Pavlovian in their form and mongrel in their caricature of their player, of any modern Ubisoft game. That is the state of play. All higher actions of the game multiply this burden with their complexity entirely counter to how most games reward iteration internally.

About the art direction, specifically to the resources allotted to the 20th anniversary edition, I can hope only to god that all concepts that are constituent to the world are known solely to their creators as closed in their signifier/signified relationship, for their designs and functions representative of the most holistic reprisal of grand plagiarism from general sci-fi of the 20th century that I’ve ever seen - not a single asset or idea here is, less than meaningfully, not even shamefully, changed from their original source: Blade Runner, Zardoz, Total Recall, Fantastic Voyage, Alphaville, Star Trek; all are taken in full regalia for this unholy peopling of a sorry state blighting the idea of cognizance and collectivism.

The meat souring the meal, poisoning the stock from which it came, spreading an influenza from its smallest microbial spirit, is the design. I’ve tried my best to be as pungently vitriolic as I can be in this review, to hopefully relate how truly truly depthless the lows this piece of software cannot even sink finally to, and even so I don’t think I have the language to get across in opinionated criticism how stupefying every interaction and screen complex are. I can mention how there is not a single puzzle, if you can call something by so charitable an associative term when they are as far from our conception of puzzle as the human spirit is from a eukaryotic cell dividing, is worthwhile for its solving: death in scores, intuition damned from access, genre or reflex reliance entirely refuted from this realm all are the component, and sole, building blocks of the encounter and world design of Another World. As the mechanics are walking on trench foot long past saving, the design is compounded miles of trench for which the reward of traversing is amputation and bleeding out.

This game is so tremendously bad, almost unutterably worthless, that it makes me question all other media that I have associated with what I can rate on GG the lowest score. Every other game I’ve given ½ a star to is leagues better than this, and I hate those games. Nearly every movie on Letterboxd I’ve rated the same lowest score compares to this game as drinking from the fountain of eternal youth compares to the cursed eating the apple of Eden, and I’ve considered some of those movies as harmful to the idea of what a human is to be. Some of the worst books I have read in my life to completion are texts to devote lifelong study to in fair comparison to Another World. Another World is quite possibly the worst piece of media I have ever engaged with. And I like tough media. In fact, I love tough media: I love “À la recherche du temps perdu”, I love “Satantango”, I love “Pathologic”, I love “Litanies of Satan”. I can hack worthwhile media that tries to buck off all earnest riders up until the slam of the back cover. To be engaged with a difficult work is to savour the art as an act that, while even as it takes something from you so dear, you cannot allow yourself to think your own conception correct without that art in your life. Another World, by that metric, is not worth knowing exists, much less interacting with.