Abe returns with an ambitious and highly entertaining remake of his second installment.
The story behind the creation of Oddworld is, to say the least, gripping. When Abe’s Oddysee , its first installment, was released in 1997 for PlayStation and PC, it did so with the promise of being the foundation stone for an ambitious project that would span five games . However, plans do not always go as expected and the success of that fantastic adventure forced its second part to be done in just nine months, preventing Oddworld Inhabitants from creating the sequel they really wanted. While this made for a great game, it was so similar to its predecessor that for many it was more of a gigantic expansion than something truly new.
With the arrival of the next generation, the series became one of the great exclusives on consoles of the first Xbox, which eventually led to Oddworld: Munch’s Oddysee and Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath . With the first, an unsuccessful attempt was made to jump to 3D, while the second was an authentic spin-off game that was left out of the pentalogy. Unfortunately, both hit such a hit in the market that the saga ended up being canceled before its story could conclude .
Luckily, the hope of seeing its end one day returned in 2014 with the release of Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee New N ‘Tasty! , a fantastic remake of the first game that updated and modernized the classic to mark the beginning of the series’ rebirth. Now, almost seven years after that milestone, it is Oddworld: Abe’s Exoddus’s turn to receive its own remake of Oddworld: Soulstorm , the most ambitious project its creators have ever embarked on . Does it live up to its legacy?
Much more than a remake
Yes with New N ‘Tasty! The studio sought to offer us an extremely faithful reproduction of the original but with updated graphics and certain technical and playable improvements, the approach taken to remake the sequel is the opposite . Taking advantage of this new opportunity to narrate this part of Abe’s journey, Lorne Lanning and his team have wanted to remove the thorn from the hasty development of Abe’s Exoddus to capture here their authentic vision of what this work should have been. Or what is the same: for practical purposes we are facing a totally new game .
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A hard journey awaits Abe in which a terrible truth will be revealed that will put the fate of his people in check.
Yes, the story reaches the same points and we are going to go through many places that we already know , but everything is so changed that the similarities with the 1998 title are practically anecdotal, which we think is great and has allowed us to enjoy a completely new Oddworld after so many years, something that hasn’t happened since Stranger’s Wrath .
At the narrative level, it is a direct sequel to the events that we live in New N ‘Tasty! , so we will have to accompany again a tormented Abe as he carries the responsibility of saving his race from slavery. Obviously, the script has been rewritten and expanded , changing the order of certain events to give greater coherence to the odyssey, better maintain the intrigue of the mysteries posed to us and make everything more exciting. In addition, it also delves much more into the characters and the background of this universe, so, in the end, we have a very pleasant, entertaining, well-told story with a rather peculiar tone .
As for the playable, we once again have a 2.5D platform adventure in which puzzles and stealth take the lead . Our objective will be none other than to overcome a series of more or less linear levels, something that is much easier to say than to do, since we will not stop running into all kinds of dangers and situations that will force us to be very precise with the controls and use our ingenuity to survive, especially if we intend to rescue 80% of the Mudokons of each phase to unlock the last two screens and see the true ending.
Moving stealthily is essential to survive certain situations. Now we have an indicator in which we can see the alarm status of the enemies in the area.
As you already know, our hero is quite atypical and is far from being a great warrior, so we will always lose in a direct confrontation against our enemies, thus forcing us to use our cunning to kill them or avoid them without us detect . If there is something that has caught our attention from the first moment, it is how much controls have been improved compared to any previous delivery. Abe is now considerably more agile, can perform double jumps, and the chant mechanic for possessing enemies has been redesigned quite cleverly to allow us to target our targets by moving a sphere of limited duration.
What has slightly disappointed us is the simplification of our interaction options with the Mudokons , because now we will only limit ourselves to telling them to follow us or stay still, so forget about having to deal with their different moods or abilities so fun such as explosive farts, modifications that we understand have been made to maintain the most serious, dark and dramatic tone that has been wanted to give to this installment.
In return, we have gained a crafting system that allows us to collect materials to build useful objects , such as mines, grenades, projectiles that bind our enemies if they manage to hit them and even flamethrowers with which to defend ourselves . The positive part of this is that we now have a greater variety of tools that allow us to solve the same situation in many different ways, encouraging our creativity and imagination when it comes to overcoming the challenges we encounter, something that we liked. a lot of.
Mudokons on the attack
We can now give our followers items to use when they encounter enemies and have an option to defend themselves. Throughout the game we will also encounter situations in which we must escort a large number of Mudokons, something that we can do more easily if we place our “henchmen” in strategic positions on the stage to cover the spawn points of the Mudokons. Sligs.
However, this also implies having to rummage through all the garbage cans and lockers that we see, a task that breaks the rhythm a lot and that can become extremely tedious , especially when we die after having collected lots of materials, we load checkpoint and we have to re-register everything. And yes, this is an Oddworld game , so you can assume that you are going to die quite a few times, as there is hardly any room for error.
On the other hand, we have a level design that in general we liked: they hide an infinity of secrets that reward our curiosity, there are very varied challenges and they are always testing us in many different ways, making each step we take something enormously rewarding and satisfying . Plus, there are tons of checkpoints so we never have to repeat too long sections and don’t mind retrying them, and its unique mix of platforming, puzzles, and stealth still works like a charm to this day.
Of course, not everything is perfect and we will not deny that we have come across some sections that are not too inspired or with poorly calculated jumps and that certain levels tend to lengthen too much in a somewhat artificial way , repeating ideas and situations that are too similar to each other. they fail to contribute much. We also have to point out that despite the improvement they have received, the controls are far from perfect and there are several peaks of difficulty in which we require precision that the controller is not always willing to give us.
If we want to save all the Mudokons we are going to have to explore a lot and make use of all our gray matter and skill so that they can overcome the many obstacles that we will find on the way.
Another source of frustrations and gratuitous deaths we have in the problems of the AI and the bugs that the program suffers , with allies that sometimes are not able to follow us correctly or imitate our actions, enemies that get stuck in specific, physical positions that sometimes do not work as they should, falls into the void after crossing a wall or, worse still, that after dying the checkpoint does not correctly load the position of the Mudokons that followed us and we lose them. We would like to say that they are occasional problems, but the truth is that we have had to deal with quite a few errors that have ended up spoiling the experience a bit.
Changing a bit of third, it should be noted that it is a fairly long and replayable game . It took us about 20 hours to see its true end, but there is also a phase selector so that we can retry the levels as much as we want, face its optional challenges, improve our marks and save or condemn the Mudokons that we have left, so it is not exactly lacking in content.
On an artistic level it is amazing. Oddworld remains a unique and fascinating universe.
Regarding its graphic section, do not expect a spectacular technical finish, but a very careful artistic direction, very elaborate scenarios and with a lot of detail and some good models that surprise especially during the pampered video sequences. Also noteworthy is the lighting and the important role it plays in certain phases. The animations are not bad either and the effects do their job properly. Regarding its performance, we have played on PS5 and although it generally goes at 60 fps, we have detected some occasional drops. Finally, we have a very ambient soundtrack that goes completely unnoticed, good effects and a great dubbing into English with Spanish subtitles (unfortunately, some elements of the interface suffer serious translation errors).
Conclusions
Oddworld: Soulstorm is much more than just a remake: it is a completely new game with which to relive the second chapter of Abe’s great odyssey through the strange and fascinating world of Oddworld . It is far from being a round title and it suffers from some errors that keep it from being outstanding, but it knows how to offer us an entertaining adventure with a lot of personality, satisfying like few others and that hooks from beginning to end. If you liked New N ‘Tasty! As much as we do or you just miss a platform and puzzle game like the old ones, don’t hesitate to give it a try.
