Poopworld Collection
My sister bought me this collection for Christmas because we loved Munch's Oddysee as children. Little did I know I was in for quite a journey into the minds of British people who love wee and poop jokes... I just want to say I had a mediocre time on this toilet. And I think poop jokes are pretty funny hahahha! Uh oh! Stinky!
As a preface, I played these games mostly in handheld mode. Also, spoiler warning.
As a preface, I played these games mostly in handheld mode. Also, spoiler warning.
3 Games
I feel like there's not much I can say about Abe's Oddysee that hasn't been said before. It's a game with solid puzzle design, slick character movement, and unique, anti-capitalist theming. But what I can comment on is the Switch's version of this "ground up" remake. As I've heard, the game launched on other platforms with controls that were less-than-satisfying. I found the controls here to be just okay; if anything, there's a little input lag. They were actually what I complained about the most while playing, but, by the end of the game, I was moving Abe around dexterously. The Switch remake must have ameliorated these control issues.
My second most common complaint while playing was that this game suffers from overdesigned environments, which can be very frustrating in a puzzle game where you have to look for small items like grenades, levers, switches, and buttons. Lighting and shadows will try to point you in the right direction, but when you are playing on such a small screen with so much packed into each frame, there's only so much they can do. During the Elum sections, between the input lag, cluttered backgrounds, and the lag from playing this game in handheld mode, I was violently "quiksaving" to strongarm through it. Regardless, I think the game looks quite nice due to how colorful and striking the environments are. Matthewmatosis' commentary on the subject a bit nit-picky. The developers took their shot and, with that, created a different mood that works.
Overall, I enjoyed playing this game the most in the series. My problems at this point of my journey were the out-of-place humor (poop jokes everywhere) and the strange difficulty curve (the beginning is so much harder than the end). In retrospect, I was not prepared for how far the series would fall, despite blaring warnings from almost all fans of Oddworld.
Rating: 3/5
My second most common complaint while playing was that this game suffers from overdesigned environments, which can be very frustrating in a puzzle game where you have to look for small items like grenades, levers, switches, and buttons. Lighting and shadows will try to point you in the right direction, but when you are playing on such a small screen with so much packed into each frame, there's only so much they can do. During the Elum sections, between the input lag, cluttered backgrounds, and the lag from playing this game in handheld mode, I was violently "quiksaving" to strongarm through it. Regardless, I think the game looks quite nice due to how colorful and striking the environments are. Matthewmatosis' commentary on the subject a bit nit-picky. The developers took their shot and, with that, created a different mood that works.
Overall, I enjoyed playing this game the most in the series. My problems at this point of my journey were the out-of-place humor (poop jokes everywhere) and the strange difficulty curve (the beginning is so much harder than the end). In retrospect, I was not prepared for how far the series would fall, despite blaring warnings from almost all fans of Oddworld.
Rating: 3/5
I'm not usually the type of person who wants to ruin people's parties, but if you are a person who wants to see more of Munch in future Oddworld games, I don't understand you at all. Munch burned my bridges, destroyed my crops, and ruined my life. Between the shitty camera that gets stuck on walls, floaty controls combined with excessive platforming, and mindless "puzzles" in huge open spaces, I was losing my fucking mind. It has every gameplay bad trope of early 2000s videogames: large levels with no variety, brainless shit humor, and what I can assume to be purposefully ugly models? I wouldn't recommend this game to anyone, even to someone who wants to play the entire Oddworld series, due to its ungodly length and how badly it aged.
The worst of it all is the sound design. This is what was truly driving me up the wall. The characters belch, scratch their butts, and fart constantly, and these sounds are the loudest sounds in the game. There's no options for subtitles, and the only way you are given directions for what you are supposed to do in the level is through the Shaman, a character who verbally gives you instructions throughout the levels, so you HAVE to hear the ass scratching repeatedly blare out of the tiny Switch speakers. The burp/flatulence button is also the same button as the run button… why??? It has no purpose other than to annoy the player. Imagine this: You are trying to run away from Sligs and Scrabs that are chasing you for the umpteenth-million time, but you start a few seconds after hitting the button because your character chooses to stand still and blech instead of book it. You are hit by the enemies and your Munch awkwardly crumples onto the cold metal floor. You have to reload your "quiksave" from a few moments earlier for the third time. How could they not foresee this issue?
The voice acting for Abe is simultaneously tinny and muffled, as if it is coming out of a fried radio, because they took it directly from the first PS1 game, placed the compressed audio files into this game, and now the sounds are coming out of these speakers for ants. The sound that plays when the characters hit the ground has a wonderful bug where it plays maybe 25 times in the span of a second after making contact with the ground from the smallest possible drop. You can hear Mudokons violently itching their bottoms from halfway across the level. Fuck! All the Mudokons have the same voice and the same three voice lines! Fuck! I can hear the sound for when you release the Fuzzles from their cages in my sleep. Fuck.
I didn't want to be entirely negative in this, so something that was good was that the first and final cutscenes were memorable. The introduction of the story narrated by the cute, little Munch may feel Oddworld-esque and may inspire feelings of discovering an alien planet. I don't hate Lulu's character design. However, in total, there are 45 minutes of cutscenes within a slog of a 12 hour game. The cutscenes are ugly, the characters within them have pretty miserable sounds coming from their mouths, and it doesn't tell an immersive story about the threat of looming climate change/capitalism like Abe's Oddysee does. But the establishing and ultimate cutscenes are memorable, at the very least. I know the history, and I know that the Oddworld team had a very tumultuous creative and development process. But I don't really care. As far as this Switch port goes, there's some crashing, some bugs, etc., but I can't confirm that they weren't also in the original game.
Rating: 1/5
The worst of it all is the sound design. This is what was truly driving me up the wall. The characters belch, scratch their butts, and fart constantly, and these sounds are the loudest sounds in the game. There's no options for subtitles, and the only way you are given directions for what you are supposed to do in the level is through the Shaman, a character who verbally gives you instructions throughout the levels, so you HAVE to hear the ass scratching repeatedly blare out of the tiny Switch speakers. The burp/flatulence button is also the same button as the run button… why??? It has no purpose other than to annoy the player. Imagine this: You are trying to run away from Sligs and Scrabs that are chasing you for the umpteenth-million time, but you start a few seconds after hitting the button because your character chooses to stand still and blech instead of book it. You are hit by the enemies and your Munch awkwardly crumples onto the cold metal floor. You have to reload your "quiksave" from a few moments earlier for the third time. How could they not foresee this issue?
The voice acting for Abe is simultaneously tinny and muffled, as if it is coming out of a fried radio, because they took it directly from the first PS1 game, placed the compressed audio files into this game, and now the sounds are coming out of these speakers for ants. The sound that plays when the characters hit the ground has a wonderful bug where it plays maybe 25 times in the span of a second after making contact with the ground from the smallest possible drop. You can hear Mudokons violently itching their bottoms from halfway across the level. Fuck! All the Mudokons have the same voice and the same three voice lines! Fuck! I can hear the sound for when you release the Fuzzles from their cages in my sleep. Fuck.
I didn't want to be entirely negative in this, so something that was good was that the first and final cutscenes were memorable. The introduction of the story narrated by the cute, little Munch may feel Oddworld-esque and may inspire feelings of discovering an alien planet. I don't hate Lulu's character design. However, in total, there are 45 minutes of cutscenes within a slog of a 12 hour game. The cutscenes are ugly, the characters within them have pretty miserable sounds coming from their mouths, and it doesn't tell an immersive story about the threat of looming climate change/capitalism like Abe's Oddysee does. But the establishing and ultimate cutscenes are memorable, at the very least. I know the history, and I know that the Oddworld team had a very tumultuous creative and development process. But I don't really care. As far as this Switch port goes, there's some crashing, some bugs, etc., but I can't confirm that they weren't also in the original game.
Rating: 1/5
There's less poop jokes, but the humor is still as immature and underbaked as ever. It's also placed within a much more serious narrative, especially after the plot twist. Like the half third person, half first person POV, the direction is all over the place.
Once again, we are returning to the sound design. I've seen praise online for some of the sounds in this game, specifically the voice acting of the main character when he bounties a baddie or jumps, but I just don't like them. Hearing the same "HOO HAH" jump noises over and over as I used the Stranger's floaty jumps to platform aggravated me after a while. A lot of the sounds are grating due to lack of variety and varying quality. The side species, the Clakkers and Grubbs, are annoying. The Clakkers all have the same fake Southern accent voice lines that they repeat ad nauseum as you walk through their towns. And the Grubbs speak so slowly and with so many "likes" to get out poorly explained exposition… I'm really not sure what they were going for here. It's as if the devs wanted you to laugh only because their side characters sound stupid, which may have worked at the time on audiences, I guess, but it does not capture the original tone of Oddworld. I think they may have changed the voice acting for the Grubbs in the HD release for some reason? I can't figure out why. This game's sound design is truly an unwelcome encore of Munch's.
To provide more commentary on the Switch version, there's some issues. The game is expansive and colorful, but the framerate falters in large environments, especially in handheld mode. The game crashed on me a couple of times. Most importantly, however, are the problems with the camera when you switch into first person. I don't know if it's the analog sticks on the joycons, the lack of control settings (acceleration, speed, etc.), or what, but it simply doesn't feel right to shoot baddies in this game! And the "fast-paced" FPS action is what was primarily used to market this game. I tried with both gyroscope and traditional control schemes and both felt unsatisfying overall. I also don't know how the original felt, or how the remake feels on PC, but I've heard they control much better. Because of this major issue, I'd say another version of the game might provide a more enjoyable experience.
The game ends with a strangely-literal-for-the-text quote from Chief Luther Standing Bear of the Oglala Lakota nation. In a game that features a slow-speaking, loincloth-adorning, spear-slinging tribal alien race with no autonomy over their own land or lives without the help of members of a "higher" race, this feels tone deaf to me. I haven't seen any discussion of this in any of my research online, so I may be reading more into it than necessary, but I found this theming really weird and uncomfortable. The plot twist was also a little weird to me. As a queer person, I couldn't help but to liken the Stranger's desire to change his body to internal conflicts people in the LGBT+ community struggle with-- namely, societal pressures of gender roles, homophobia and discrimination, bottom surgery as a means of survival, etc. There's many elements here that don't fit within my reading, but themes presented did get me thinking analytically, which I'd say is a good thing. Narrative-wise, this was a welcome twist, but gameplay-wise, it was frustrating. I wish you got to keep your upgrades after the change.
By the time I finally flushed the Oddworld Collection, I was happy to get off the pot. If you are trying to return to the games of your childhood, investigate an odd series, or experience early 2000s poop humor, these Switch ports may be an easily accessible medium for achieving those things. But if you are looking for the best way, this is not ideal. Thanks for reading.
Rating: 2/5
Once again, we are returning to the sound design. I've seen praise online for some of the sounds in this game, specifically the voice acting of the main character when he bounties a baddie or jumps, but I just don't like them. Hearing the same "HOO HAH" jump noises over and over as I used the Stranger's floaty jumps to platform aggravated me after a while. A lot of the sounds are grating due to lack of variety and varying quality. The side species, the Clakkers and Grubbs, are annoying. The Clakkers all have the same fake Southern accent voice lines that they repeat ad nauseum as you walk through their towns. And the Grubbs speak so slowly and with so many "likes" to get out poorly explained exposition… I'm really not sure what they were going for here. It's as if the devs wanted you to laugh only because their side characters sound stupid, which may have worked at the time on audiences, I guess, but it does not capture the original tone of Oddworld. I think they may have changed the voice acting for the Grubbs in the HD release for some reason? I can't figure out why. This game's sound design is truly an unwelcome encore of Munch's.
To provide more commentary on the Switch version, there's some issues. The game is expansive and colorful, but the framerate falters in large environments, especially in handheld mode. The game crashed on me a couple of times. Most importantly, however, are the problems with the camera when you switch into first person. I don't know if it's the analog sticks on the joycons, the lack of control settings (acceleration, speed, etc.), or what, but it simply doesn't feel right to shoot baddies in this game! And the "fast-paced" FPS action is what was primarily used to market this game. I tried with both gyroscope and traditional control schemes and both felt unsatisfying overall. I also don't know how the original felt, or how the remake feels on PC, but I've heard they control much better. Because of this major issue, I'd say another version of the game might provide a more enjoyable experience.
The game ends with a strangely-literal-for-the-text quote from Chief Luther Standing Bear of the Oglala Lakota nation. In a game that features a slow-speaking, loincloth-adorning, spear-slinging tribal alien race with no autonomy over their own land or lives without the help of members of a "higher" race, this feels tone deaf to me. I haven't seen any discussion of this in any of my research online, so I may be reading more into it than necessary, but I found this theming really weird and uncomfortable. The plot twist was also a little weird to me. As a queer person, I couldn't help but to liken the Stranger's desire to change his body to internal conflicts people in the LGBT+ community struggle with-- namely, societal pressures of gender roles, homophobia and discrimination, bottom surgery as a means of survival, etc. There's many elements here that don't fit within my reading, but themes presented did get me thinking analytically, which I'd say is a good thing. Narrative-wise, this was a welcome twist, but gameplay-wise, it was frustrating. I wish you got to keep your upgrades after the change.
By the time I finally flushed the Oddworld Collection, I was happy to get off the pot. If you are trying to return to the games of your childhood, investigate an odd series, or experience early 2000s poop humor, these Switch ports may be an easily accessible medium for achieving those things. But if you are looking for the best way, this is not ideal. Thanks for reading.
Rating: 2/5