The Oddworld Series (part 1... maybe)

The Oddworld franchise has, for the longest time, been my favourite video game franchise (with the possible exception of Half-Life and Monkey Island). The original Abe’s Oddysee was one of the first games I ever played along with LEGO Racers, Lemmings, The Pink Panther: Hokus Pokus Pink, and a demo for Return of the Incredible Machine: Contraptions. Well, that being said, the word ‘played’ is perhaps misused in this circumstance; I’m not sure when I first played Abe’s Oddysee myself, because for a while I insisted that my dad play it while I watched.

Anyway, the point being it was one of my first games and I’ve played it (or watched my dad play it) at least once a year ever since I was about 7 years old; often far more than once a year. And with that said, I never actually played it myself without cheats and no-clipping until I was during the first half a decade or so.

Right, enough yabbering; Abe’s Oddysee. The game was originally released on the PS1 in 1997 and like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, it elected not to take “advantage” of the PS1’s 3D capabilities, because the PS1’s 3D capabilities made games look like PS1 games (you know what I mean); So Abe’s Oddysee stuck to the 2D art style, and was designed a cinematic platformer, and it was brutally difficult; harder than Flashback, but easier than Another World (that’s Out of This World if you’re American).

The game puts you in control of the eponymous Abe, a member of a slave race known as the Mudokons put work in the factory of RuptureFarms, the biggest meat-packing plant on Oddworld. Eavesdropping on a board meeting while working late one night at RuptureFarms, Abe discovers that Glukkons were scared because profits were grim. But the CEO, Mullock the Glukkon, had a plan; a new kind of meat harvested from his own work force. Abe, understandably terrified, flees the factory in a blind panic; quite successfully, but becoming a fugitive in the process. After passing the outer boundaries of RuptureFarms’ influence he is approached by a shaman of his people and is told of his destiny to free his own kind from the clutches of slavery and the chopping board. After a spiritual journey through the trials of the ancient Mudokon temples of Paramonia and Scrabania, Abe gains the power to fuck shit up, he returns to the dark oppressive atmosphere of RuptureFarms to rescue his brethren, and shut-down the factory for good becoming a messianic hero to his people.

The direct sequel to Abe’s Oddysee was Abe’s Exoddus, and it’s both better and worse than the Oddysee. First the story; after Abe’s liberation of his fellow Mudokons, he’s visited by the ghosts of ancient Mudokons whose spirits have been disturbed by the Glukkon excavation of their ancestral burial grounds of Necrum. Why? To harvest the Mudokon bones of course. Why? To ground them into a powder to brew them into a fucking addictive drink, Soulstorm Brew. Yeah, as dark as the first game was, Exoddus takes it to 11. Not only are the bones of the ancient Mudokons being dug up for brewing into alcohol (I assume it’s alcohol), but living Mudokons are being tortured so the Glukkons can harvest their fucking tears as the secret ingredient to the Soulstorm Brew, and on top of that, the Mudokon slaves they’ve got working the mines have had their eyes stitched shut. It’s at this point that you realise that Oddworld Inhabitants are fucking twisted... and I love it.

Now, the bad side of Exoddus comes from the fact that it was developed over the course of a meagre nine months. Sure most of the game is derived from the assets of Oddysee, but even then, there was a lot that they added in, not to mention that all the environments and levels were all new with not a single one being reused from the original games. The game was also twice as long as Oddysee; so with twice the number levels to build from the ground up; all the new CGI cutscenes to create; and all the new game mechanics, including new monsters and enemies, the game ends up feeling a little bit rushed; especially, I found, in the last set of levels that take place in the brewery itself. But that being said, it’s certainly not a bad game. It just didn’t have development time it really needed to be what it should have been; which means I am really looking forward to the reimagining of Abe’s Exoddus, called Oddworld: Soulstorm, which has so far had 6 years of development and will hopefully be released later this year.

In 2001 came a new contender to the Console War, Microsoft’s Xbox. One of the launch titles for this console (and also the only reason I bought one) was the third main Oddworld title, Munch’s Oddysee. Side note, before we carry on, throughout this article I’ve been spelling Odyssey and Exodus wrong; that’s on purpose. Anyway, Munch’s Oddysee was on a 6^th gen console and could no longer stay 2D and be taken seriously, so it went 3D.

Personally I think that Munch’s Oddysee is the weakest of the Oddworld games, but by no means is it a bad game. In fact it’s a really good game, just weaker than all the other Oddworld games. One of the reasons I think this is the drastic change in tone from the previous games. Munch’s Oddysee is as whimsical as the previous entries are dark and horrifying. Abe now has a cartoonishly goofy twinge to his voice, while before he came across as rather sombre with a depressed twinge. The soundtrack is also light and bouncy, while previously it had been oppressive, mechanical, and often vaguely militaristic. The humorous elements, which were present in the previous games I won’t deny, had been turned up to clownish degrees.

The other main reason why I think Munch’s Oddysee is the weakest game is that it so much easier, and almost impossible to fail. In both Abe games, you die in one hit, no matter what hit you, and have to start from the last checkpoint or (in the case of Exoddus) quicksave. You get shot once, you die; you get bitten by something, you die; something falls on you, you die. The only exception I can think of are the fleeches in the second game that kill you in about 6 or 7 quick successive hits. Also, the previous games had fall damage; you fall from at least one screen’s worth of height and you die.

Munch’s Oddysee on the other hand has health bars, for both your player characters (you play as both Abe and Munch), and there is absolutely no penalty for death. If you’re playing with just one character and they die, you respawn a couple of rooms back; if you’re playing one of the levels with both characters and one of them dies, the other character can manually respawn them using respawn points. If both your characters die then you will have to restart the level. Both of your characters can take huge amounts of damage too; if you’re at full health and you tread on a mine (the kind that explode), as long as it only happens once, you’ll be fine. This game is sooo easy.

Now, before we move on to the 4^th main game in the series, I wanted to talk about the hand-held games. If you were to go to the Wikipedia page for Abe’s Oddysee, Abe’s Exoddus, and Munch’s Oddysee, you will be told that all three games were ported to the Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance respectively; this is a total lie. If you were to buy any of the three Game Boy games having only heard of them being referred to as ‘ports’ thinking “great, now I can play this game on the go as well”, you will be thoroughly disappointed.

Oddworld Adventures is accurately described as a severely cut-down version of Abe’s Oddysee. That’s technically accurate; it certainly has the similar gameplay, but the game consists entirely of a single chapter of the original game, specifically the Paramonia chapter; which as I mentioned earlier was only one half of the actual point of that part of the game. Oddworld Adventures II is similarly described as a severely cut-down version of Abe’s Exoddus, and this is a bit more of an accurate statement because it does, generally speaking, have a through-line in common, but the two games don’t have any levels in common with each other. At least the two Oddworld Adventures games are actually cinematic platformers. The worst of the hand-held games is easily Munch’s Oddysee.

The first reason is obvious; it doesn’t even give any indication that it’s a different game. It’s just called Oddworld: Munch’s Oddysee, but it and the Xbox version have nothing, nothing, in common with each other. Let me provide a small list of things that the GBA game does differently:

-          The gameplay

-          The levels

-          The story

I’d say those three things are fairly fundamental to a games identity. You could maybe drop one of them and get away with calling it the same game. Maybe the GBA couldn’t handle the 3D environments of the Xbox version so they had to simplify the gameplay, but kept the same basic level layout and storyline. Or maybe it was the levels that were too big for the GBA to handle so they had to be cut down and simplified, but the gameplay and storyline remained intact. Or maybe even it was, say the cutscenes that ruined it so they kept the gameplay and levels, but had to write something different to connect the levels together; a bit of a stretch but I could buy it.

But, no. They changed everything. In fact, it is demonstrably a sequel to the Xbox game because Abe and Munch are already friends at the beginning of the game. But that’s not all. Oddworld: Munch’s Oddysee for the Game Boy Advance remains the only Oddworld game that I’ve never completed. I finished both Oddworld Adventures games, but this one I just couldn’t. And it was only because of a single level... that consisted of a maze... that you navigated by jumping into wells that launch you across the map. Fuck mazes, especially gimmicky mazes.

I’ll finish by saying that Stranger’s Wrath is probably my favourite game of all time.