The Stack

Back to Oddworld, then. The fourth and (as of now) last of the series is something of a break from the previous games, but not as much as you’d think from first glance. It’s a shooter rather than a puzzler, but it’s a fairly puzzly shooter, in a stealth-and-tactics way. It’s Western-flavored, putting you in the role of a bounty hunter in a series of dusty frontier mining towns amidst mesas and badlands, but the outdoors sections of the Abe games had a significant Western vibe as well. It’s more overtly macho than the previous games, with a gruff brawler for a hero, but the previous games had their macho side as well.

Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that where the character of Abe was a tough guy disguised as a weirdo, Stranger — that seems to be his name; he isn’t “the Stranger”, he’s just “Stranger” — is a weirdo disguised as a tough guy. He’s a bit animalistic, with a face that’s a bit like a lion and a bit like a goat, and an odd way of using his feet when climbing a rope. If you make him run for a sufficiently long distance, he drops to all fours to run faster. Even weirder, his ammo consists of animals as well: small living creatures scavenged from the wild and fired from a sort of hand-mounted double-barreled crossbow. Instead of looting ammo from your fallen adversaries, you go hunting for it.

The one really big difference from the previous games is motivation. Abe and Munch were out to save their people. If Stranger has a people, I haven’t seen them. He seems to be the only one of his kind in a land populated by lumpy outlaws and the chicken people they prey on. No, Stranger’s motivation is money. In the previous games, that was the motivation of the bad guys. It’s been mentioned that he needs the money for a life-saving operation, but the result is that he’s not much concerned with causing destruction if it doesn’t get in the way of his bounties, and is even willing to steal from the chicken people himself if given the opportunity. It does, however, inspire him to take some care with those bounties. Part of the basic mechanics of the game is that bringing them in alive is worth more than killing them. I’ll probably go into that more fully later.