Clever puzzles and awesome platforming collide in one heck of a game with the hero you didn't expect to be.
One of the best examples to render these awfully misinformed people wrong is Oddworld Inhabitant's own, fiendish platforming puzzle game, Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee. The first of the scheduled five games in the series, Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee has redefined 2D platforming in a certain way. In fact, it could very well team up with Castlevania: SotN and relieve the genre of its spiky straps and splinters, even in this century of realistic 3D. Besides, old school classics can ALWAYS beat the likes of BioShock.
As it goes, you're Abe, of the Mudokon race, and former employee of the month in Rupture Farms, a sadistic meat processing company, perhaps the biggest in all of Oddworld. What's supposed to be a smooth sailing goes downhill, as the company's sales go down because of certain "resources" running thin. But Mullock, the company's cigar-smoking head, has hatched a master plan: To use Mudokons as the next best-selling product of Rupture Farms.
Of course, Abe, being the employee that he is, has been working hard at night and has overheard (or rather, eavesdropped) at the company's private meeting with its officials. Scared to death, he's been detected and is now on escape.
It's this story that builds up the gameplay, because your mouth is stitched shut, you have the posture of a monkey, the strength of a 12-year-old and the wit of Albert Einstein. I'm not joking. To be Abe and rescue the Mudokons, you've got to be smart and solve the game's many puzzles, tough through and through. But the puzzles are rendered harder, thanks to the company's own "shoot-everything-that-moves" grunts called Sligs. Fortunately, Abe's wise race can chant and take over the poor, brainless grunts, but under few circumstances. Saving your race from the company you used to work on isn't a cinch exactly if you aren't Dracula's son. And it'll be a lot harder if I mention that many other creatures are out to get you in an effort to survive.
The puzzles have multiple solutions, and it's a real incentive in itself to actually discover a new way of solving it. You're lucky too, since most of the enemies you encounter are stupid enough to run on landmines and get squished by meat mashers. The environment is your playground, and it offers everything you need to help the Mudokons into freedom.
To rescue the Mudokons, you'd have to try and communicate with them in certain ways like one-word sentences, whistles and probably most people's favorite, farts. Good thing that the controls are well and responsive, no delays and no annoying camera to boot. You'd have to be knocked out too, by the sheer beauty of the graphics and brilliant FMVs that easily rival Heart of Darkness or Castlevania: SotN. It's also musically in-depth, as the sound effects and voice acting are just as good as any award-winning movie.
But no matter how good a game is, it gets progressively boring. Not in Abe's book. In your first rush-through, it's impossible to get every single Mudokon (that is, assuming you didn't read walkthroughs), and that's reason enough to play again. What's more, an added incentive to collect every one of your friends is waiting for you at the end.
Yes, Abe's Oddysee is up in ranks of Castlevania: SotN and Heart of Darkness as one of the best games to prove those nit-picky 3D purists wrong about their initial impression of the genre.
Call him ugly, but Abe can kick serious butt with his wit.