Stop me if you've heard this one before: A (cult) classic and highly influential piece of media got an unnecessary continuation, and the creator (or at least, the one spearheading) the original had little to no involvement with the development. I had low expectations going in, yet somehow HOTA surpassed those and garnered my rare one-star rating.

I already linked the source when replaying AW on the same system, but Eric Chahi did go on record saying that a potential continuation could work and suggested making it within an alien's POV. Thing is, Interplay took this literally, putting Buddy from the original in as the MC role now, and having Lester be the AI companion. This new focus, along with the inclusion of extensive flashbacks as to who Buddy was and showing his side of the first outing, infuriates me, both because it goes so far against the intentional minimalism and ambiguity nature, and also lessens both the world and himself by becoming too centralized on common tropes. I already felt like there was a tinge of rebellion and brute force militarism, I didn't need to have poorly rotoscoped cutscenes getting all-in on the action angle to try and convey this further, nor did I need to have an emphasis on the Red-Eyed Enemy from before being the central antagonist this time, being the reason Buddy's village was ransacked and ruined as well as being captured. Even without all that, it just adds nothing to the overall narrative here, just muddying up the pacing at the beginning, and it also makes me question why Lester is even here cause he shows up healthy suddenly, and then almost immediately get put into danger status soon after. The ending, especially, infuriates me to no end.

It was already bad there, but the gameplay really ticked me off by comparison. I feel like anyone who already felt AW, or even other cinematic platformers like PoP89 and its sequel The Shadow & The Flame, most of the Oddworld games, Eric Chahi's spiritual successor Heart Of Darkness, etc etc were too hard or clunky to control should at least be thankful they don't have immediate access to this, cause holy shit. I have no idea how, considering it's bundled in, but the shooting is way more cumbersome and janky to pull off. Instead of before where it was a standard shot tap, a shield for a first hold, and a charge shot when holding on longer, you instead of to tap extremely fast for a standard shot, and while the other two still apply, the shield is overlaid while charging up a shot, meaning it's possible to fuck up and either do one or the other, as well as potentially drop the first shield entirely, and on top of ALL that, the hitbox of Buddy is incredibly wonky, sometimes even registering a hit if you try and do anything. If this was just mano-a-mano fight with breathing room it'd be whatever, but more often you're gonna be put in fights against two baddies, or where the space between you and the lone baddie are tight, meaning it's genuinely up to pixel-perfect setups and even luck in order to survive. There were multiple times where I seriously wondered if I was doing something wrong, or if the game was just being extremely cruel and/or more obtuse.

Speaking of, my god the trial-and-error portion this time is so, so much worse than what I've encountered in my cinematic platformer ventures thus far. Not only are there far more poorly conveyed pathings by comparison, but there's also an obnoxious amount of one-hit Gotchas put on display ESPECIALLY when going through the elevator shafts with random gas puffs that can be able to kill you if they so much as touch you, with checkpoints being a bit more further apart than before. There's also like, way too many times where Moon Logic came into play when it came to progressing, such as having to climb a pillar that looks way too much like a background layer in order to dodge a bear, or needing to find bombs - one of which being hidden behind something you need to destroy yet very much looks like it's where the room ends - in order to destroy a specific mechanism so that a path on the other side of the whole area can be opened in order to cross. It's a mess, and even with tools such as rewind and save states at my tool, alongside this being short as well, I genuinely considered giving up just so I didn't have to bother with any of it.

I wish more info on this game's development was available, cause I need to know what exactly happened for the first game on the Sega CD to turn out pretty nicely, while the sequel is botched on almost every level. Eric Chahi has supposedly gone on record of disowning this game and saying it does not at all line up with his intended vision and planning of the world, and while I can only find HardcoreGaming's passing mention of this in their overview of HOTA as a source thus far, it wouldn't surprise me regardless. Goes without saying, but I obviously don't have any ill will towards any of the multiple people that worked on this, just super, super confused and annoyed by the higher-ups wanting this to be a thing in the first place. The few sole positives I can say is that the backgrounds are pretty adequate, albeit some getting too detailed for my liking, and once again the soundtrack. I'm actually unsure who composed this, since Tommy Tallarico and Jean-François Freitas are both listed on the manual and MobyGames, yet only JFF got a mention in the credits. Weird.