The folks at Oddworld Inhabitants have a reputation to maintain. Since 1997, the quirky developer has used its Oddworld games to establish a particular tone--a particularly wacky tone--while managing to portray serious issues, such as oppression and the defilement of the environment, in a humorous but thoughtful light. Mechanically, the previous three Oddworld games have focused on thoughtful puzzle-solving with only light action elements, but the leaders of the company will be the first to admit that the industry is changing as a reflection of audiences' maturing tastes. In that light, Oddworld's newest game, Stranger's Wrath, is heading in an action-oriented direction that the developer hasn't previously explored. But don't worry, Oddworld fans--that endearingly crazy sense of humor is still intact.

Interview

Lorne Lanning, Erik Yeo and Raymond Swanland give you a look inside the world of Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath.

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To be clear, this is indeed the game you've heard of previously as Oddworld Stranger. Oddworld (the company) has since decided to rechristen its new baby as Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath, first to avoid any pesky copyright conflicts, and more importantly to bring it in line with previous games' titles, such as Abe's Exoddus and Munch's Oddysee. And from our initial experience, it does seem that Stranger is indeed a wrathful character. This game is much more action-oriented than previous Oddworld titles, with serious shooting and melee combat elements in addition to some good, old-fashioned platforming.

Stranger's Wrath takes place in an entirely different part of Oddworld than we've seen before, and Stranger himself is a totally new kind of protagonist for the series, too. He's a rough-and-tumble sort, even a bit of an antihero; he's a bounty hunter who, it seems, is mostly just in it for the money. At the outset, Stranger is a mysterious figure, one whose motivations and background are not entirely clear--and Oddworld wants to keep him that way until you've played the whole game and had a chance to experience the storyline in its entirety. There are only a few things we know for sure about Stranger. For one, he doesn't seem to take any crap from anybody. For another, he dislikes guns, preferring instead to combat his enemies with some truly live ammo (more on that later). And finally, according to Oddworld Inhabitants founder and evangelist Lorne Lanning, he may not be who he appears to be. The plot thickens!

Apparently, the plot will thicken even further as you progress through the game, but we didn't get any details about how exactly that will happen. We were told to expect at least one major plot twist well past the halfway mark. Without giving too much away, we did see some brief footage of action occurring in environments that looked radically different from the dusty, Wild West-themed towns and canyons in the playable section of the game we got to try out.

Stranger's Wrath is the most action-oriented game yet in the Oddworld series.

We've come to expect a lot of personality and weird humor in the Oddworld games, and Stranger's Wrath seems not to disappoint in this regard. As a bounty hunter, you'll travel from town to town in order to interact with the locals and find out what kind of jobs need to be taken care of. In the demo we tried, we got to run Stranger around in a town populated by anthropomorphized chickens called clakkerz, who babbled incessantly to each other in the same amusingly nasal, high-strung voice. Stranger's baritone provided an amusing contrast to the clakkerz's speech, and we were able to make him speak to any nearby residents at the touch of a button. The game will contain a whopping 5,000 lines of dialogue, and much of it is both hilarious and relevant to the current task at hand.

The first thing you'll want to do when you hit a new town in Stranger's Wrath is look around for the bounty store, which has a listing of all the current jobs up for grabs. The owner of the local bounty store will tell you about the vicious varmints who are terrorizing the populace. You'll find out who they are, what they've done, and most importantly, how much you'll be paid to bring in their no-good hides. But in keeping with Oddworld's views on gratuitous violence (and Stranger's as-yet-unexplained dislike of guns), you won't have to kill your bounties. In fact, most bounties will have two reward amounts: one if you bring them in dead and one if you bring them in alive. You'll be able to blast all your bounties to kingdom come and just bring them all in dead if you want. However, it'll be in the best interest of both your ethical standing and your pocketbook to find nonlethal ways to apprehend your marks.

In fact, Oddworld's goal with Stranger's Wrath is to give you as many options as possible for playing the game in the way that best suits you. Toward that end, the game has been made with both a third-person platformer and a first-person shooter at the same time, and you'll be free to switch between viewpoints at will depending on the situation. The game will present scenarios that lean toward one view or the other; platforming will be much easier in third person, of course, while fighting multiple enemies will be easier in shooting mode by using your myriad weapon types than it will by simply fighting with your fists in third person. Going from third person to first person and back again is as quick as clicking the thumbstick, and it became second nature for us to do so within minutes of first picking up the controller.

Stranger himself is an enigmatic character whose origins and motivations aren't entirely clear.

In addition to the increased field of view, which will make things like jumping puzzles easier, third-person mode will confer a couple of specific advantages. When you run for more than a few feet in this mode, you'll drop to all fours and begin to pick up a great deal of speed, which lets you get places much faster and also allows you to bowl over enemies that get in your way. Third-person view will also give Stranger a handful of melee attacks that pack a pretty hefty punch and can come in handy when Oddworld's frontier pests get in your way. According to Oddworld, one early tester who preferred the third-person gameplay to the shooting option managed to get a surprising number of hours into the game without ever dropping into first-person mode, relying entirely on melee attacks and jumping to combat enemies instead.