Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty

Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee was an ambitious, charming game with some good puzzles and a memorable aesthetic. It was also very clearly a cinematic platformer from the 90s, so its controls were stiff as a board, and up to 50% of its gameplay was trial and error. Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty revives the game in a handful of ways, but if you’re short on time, you could call it Abe’s Oddysee with a quicksave function and get most of the point across. The difference between “frustrating trial and error” and “fun experimentation” lies in the time between failure and restart, so the quicksave makes New ‘n’ Tasty almost automatically the better game. The brighter, cleaner visual design is the most common point of contention among fans, but I see it as merely a different route to accomplishing the same goals while giving the remake its own identity.

Otherwise, this is an extremely faithful recreation. There’s now a semi-scripted scrolling camera instead of static room transitions (which were absolutely a detrimental technical limitation; don’t let purists tell you otherwise), and most puzzles are tweaked slightly as a result. There are new lower difficulty settings as well, which give the protagonist added hit-taking ability and – more interestingly – alter enemy reaction times. Perhaps surprisingly given my love of the quicksave, I’d actually still recommend playing on the classic difficulty, because being able to brute-force a number of obstacles can break most puzzles in unsatisfying ways. Those stiff controls are largely unchanged, though as in the original, once you get used to everything happening 0.5 seconds after a button is pressed, they feel oddly precise. The only truly negative change in my opinion is in the audio, which now features constant annoying dialogue from every NPC.