The Stack

I remember coveting Oddworld: Munch’s Oddysee back in 2001, when it was an Xbox exclusive. It was Oddworld in 3D! (Tomb-Raider-style behind-the-back view.) That was still a fairly big selling point at the time. Major 2D-to-3D adaptations had existed for about five years at that point, since Mario 64 in 1996, but hadn’t yet really settled down into something formulaic. Some were amazing, and some were terrible, and that very discrepancy made the field as a whole interesting to me.

Also, I feel like I must have had a serious jones for collectibles at the time. The main thing I remember from the demo kiosk at my local game store was that it had 3D Abe walking along a trail of little bloblets that disappeared like Pac-Man pellets, incrementing a counter as they went. For some reason, I found this tremendously appealing.

These bloblets, it turns out, are called “Spooce bushes”. They contain an energy that, in sufficient quantity, unlocks certain doors. This is pretty much orthogonal to everything else in the game. You just have to collect a certain amount of spooce in addition to your other goals for an area, and you generally do it by following lines of closely-spaced bushes. The bushes grow in lines because their real purpose in the game is to show you where to go. Abe’s spirit guide admits as much in-game.

And that’s emblematic of what seems to be a big difference from the first two Oddworld games. I’m about two hours in, and the emphasis is still on following directions rather than solving puzzles. This is the sort of thing people complain about when they complain about the state of games today. The first two games may have been excessively difficult, or at least excessively cruel — certainly the New ‘n’ Tasty remake took numerous steps to reduce the cruelty. Munch’s Oddysee may have been an overcorrection. But we’ll see if that changes over the course of the game. I’ve already started seeing some of the more blatant environmental hintage go away. For the first few levels, every lever or cage or other interactable object has a circular pattern on the floor around it, a sort of “Use this!” marker. Those are starting to disappear. Maybe the spooce lines will go away too after a while.

On reaching the end of Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty, I realized I was mistaken: I had not been rescuing all the hidden Mudokons as I went along. At the end of the first chapter, all the Mudokons you left behind are immediately killed, and register as such on the in-game scoreboards you can find from time to time, which give the number of Mudokons rescued, killed, and remaining. (One of the game’s more charming aspects is the way it puts out-of-game information of this sort onto in-game billboards and marquee lights.) But it turns out this only applies to the first chapter. Abandoning later Mudokons doesn’t affect the scoreboards at all.

Oh, I had found most of them. Enough to get the good ending, certainly — it turns out you only need half. The game is pretty friendly for the completist: you can replay individual chapters, and the Chapter Select menu gives details about per-chapter completion. I wasn’t sure at first if I wanted to take the time to go for 100%, seeing how I had already done so in the original version, but ultimately I decided to go for it. The game isn’t exactly like the original, after all.

There was only one chapter where I wasn’t anywhere near completion, and that’s due to a mental trap worth describing. The game starts in Zulag 1 of the meat plant, and when you return to the plant at the end, you enter through the same Zulag. The entryway is recognizable, but everything’s a bit different: enemies in different places, motion detectors where there were no motion detectors before, and of course the passage to Zulag 2 is accessible this time. Now, the basic deal with motion detectors in this game is that they’re frames that move back and forth over a stretch of hallway, and if you don’t stay perfectly still when they’re passing over you, they sound an alarm and trigger something bad, like undodgeable floating mines. The passageway back to the main part of Zulag 1 has something previously unseen: a motion detector that doesn’t move. Staying still while you wait for it to pass over you isn’t an option. Thus, it registered in my mind as an impassable obstacle, a simple way of cutting off the bulk of the level on the second visit. And that seemed reasonable, design-wise. But in fact a stationary motion detector is passable, as long as you can deal with the consequences of triggering it. All I really had to do to access the optional bulk of the chapter was take the detector at a run and keep on running.

So, having experienced Oddworld again for the first time in nearly two decades, how was the experience? Compelling enough to keep me going, obviously. This may be technological nostalgia, but there’s something satisfying to me about its use of lighting, with lots of scenes involving silhouettes against saturated color. And the gameplay is basically all about repeatedly overcoming helplessness. You start each area by sneaking and/or running away from things, but gain the upper hand through being cleverer than your foes. That’s always gratifying.

I’ve seen reviews and such that say on this basis that Abe’s Oddysee, and by extension its remake, is a nice relief from the gun-blasting violence of other games, but that notion has always struck me as strangely blinkered, coming from a limited notion of what games are or can be. There are lots of nonviolent games out there, and there always have been. Abe’s Oddysee is not one of them. This is a game full of gore, both aimed at and aimed by the player character. This is a game where you explode your enemies by chanting, trick them into walking into land mines or meat grinders, turn into a manifestation of a wrathful nature god and shoot lightning bolts at them, and even occasionally just throw grenades at them. I suspect that what the reviewers found striking was that you spend more time running and hiding than attacking, but at the same time there’s still enough attacking involved to make it seem like a real game to them. That is, it’s strikingly nonviolent for such a violent game.

At any rate, it’s been enjoyable enough that I think I’ll continue on to an Oddworld game that I haven’t played yet.

I seem to recall that Abe’s Oddysee tried to hype up the sophistication of its NPC behavior, and how the monsters had varying emotional states. It’s possible that I’m confusing this with the sequel, Abe’s Exoddus, which had varying emotional states for the rescuable Mudokons, and mechanisms for managing them, soothing the angry and cheering the sad. But the Slig guards in the first game (and its remake) definitely do have multiple states: a regular patrolling mode, an alert state when they’ve heard something but haven’t seen you yet, an agitated state when they’ve seen you and lost you. I have a very clear memory from my original play-through of a Slig guard who kept spotting me and losing me, getting more and more agitated until he beat a captive Mudokon to death. It’s nothing groundbreaking, really — just the sort of state machine you expect from a stealth game. So I wouldn’t brag about on the box, but that’s probably why I’m not in marketing.

Apart from the Sligs, there are three other sorts of monsters. The simplest of these are the Slogs, which are basically just alien attack dogs that charge and leap at you, heedless of obstacles and dangers. The Sligs keep them around in kennels that open on some sort of trigger and release multiple slogs at a time, at which point you need to already have some sort of defense, such as a ledge you can jump up onto. When you think about it, it’s a little weird that Abe is the only creature in the whole game capable of climbing up onto higher platforms. There are lots of creatures on platforms already, but how did they get there?

The other two creature types are the Scrabs and the Paramites, monsters revered as sacred by the Mudokons and valued as meat by their captors. Scrabs are clattering carapaced creatures with a crab’s pincer for a face. They’re described as territorial, meaning that they’ll chase after you if you’re within their territory and leave you alone otherwise. But their territory usually extends to the entire area they can traverse anyway, so their behavior isn’t much different from that of Slogs. There’s one major difference: Slogs attack in packs, but if a Scrab encounters another Scrab, they’ll ignore you for as long as it takes to fight each other to the death. This is presented as one of the basic rules of Scrabs in the instructions in the Scrab temple, so I was a little surprised at how little it comes into play. I think I saw exactly one Scrabfight.

The scuttling tentacled web-weaving Paramites are, to my mind, the most interesting of the creatures. They follow you around, but not too close. They turn aggressive when you get a bunch of them together, but they avoid confrontation when they’re alone. They will, however, kill you if you corner them. Even if that’s not your intention. So a typical Paramite encounter leaves me saying “I don’t want trouble, you don’t want trouble, but I need to be over where you are, and that means I need you on the other side of me.” This is something you can make puzzles from.

Escaping from the plant in the game’s first act is more or less linear, apart from excursions to rescue captive Mudokons. Out in the wild, this breaks up a bit. Each of the two temples is a hub, with open doors leading to various test chambers, and in each chamber, you do a little ritual involving a fire and some bells. This introduces the structure found throughout the plant on your return. Each zone (or “zulag”) of the plant has a hub like the ones in the temples, and each room off the hub contains a lever needed to unlock access to the next zulag.

Now, there are secret areas with captive Mudokons throughout the game. Even the temples contain some portals back to the zulags. But the funny thing is, the initial escape areas have a lot more of them than anyplace else. The game really wants you to leave some behind, and furthermore, it wants you to know that you’ve left some behind: billboard-sized signs displaying your rescuing stats, including the number of Mudokons you’ve failed to rescue, are a common sight in factory-controlled areas. So I’m fairly sure that I actually haven’t left any behind in my current run. But for most of the game, this hasn’t been hard. A little care and diligence, and you’ll find the few secrets scattered around without much trouble. Except during that initial escape. That’s the only place where I’ve gotten stuck, hunting through all the rooms I’ve already seen for secrets that I knew must be there but couldn’t find.

In fact, this has been the downfall of my attempts to replay Abe’s Oddysee in the past. When I acquired it on Steam, years after playing it from CD-ROM, I thought I’d play it through again, but I couldn’t find all the secrets in the initial escape, and eventually gave up. The game wants you to fail to rescue everyone on your first pass through the game, and after that first pass, it really wants you to start over from the very beginning. I honestly don’t remember if I played all the way to the ending on my first pass or not, but I definitely went back and found all the secrets and rescued all the Mudokons. But on later attempts? On later attempts, I was in a state that the designers don’t seem to have thought of or cared about. It wasn’t my first pass through the game, so my pride wouldn’t let me act like it was. I wasn’t about to let those Mudokons go unrescued. But at the same time, the game’s contents and structure were no longer fresh in my memory. So I had close to the same disadvantages as a first-time player. The combination produced discouragement.

And yet I have somehow avoided such discouragement this time through, and was willing to play through the initial escape enough times to clear it completely. I think this is mostly just due to the HD remake handling so much better than the original. It’s easier to keep playing something when the mere act of moving is less frustrating.

I tend to think of Abe’s Oddysee (and therefore New ‘n’ Tasty) as “that game about the alien meat processing plant”. And that’s fair: that’s where the bulk of the game takes place, including both the beginning and the ending. But there’s a substantial chunk in the middle where Abe journeys to a couple of distant temples to prove his worthiness to be the hero of his people by passing a set of puzzle-trials. Do this, and you’re rewarded with the supernatural powers you’ll need to complete the rest of the game.

It’s funny how pervasive this idea is in games, considering its lack of precedent in fiction, myth, or reality. When I see an ancient temple in a game, my first thought is “Aha, this is where I must undergo a series of trials to come into my full powers as the Chosen One!” On the basis of games, you’d think that this is the sole purpose of temples. The closest thing to this outside of games is your Indiana Jones and similar scenarios, which share the temple-as-elaborate-puzzle-mechanism idea, but are significantly different in that the puzzle-solver isn’t a Chosen One proving his worth to his gods, but rather, an outsider, cracking the secrets of a civilization other than his own. This makes it more directly an exercise in colonialism.

Bear in mind that the native Chosen One plot can still be based on colonial notions. This is certainly the case in the Oddworld, which is all about the fantasy of the exotic other and the Noble Savage. Outside of the industrial factory’s twisted and oppressive capitalist nightmare, Mudokons live in harmony with nature, build monumental structures out of crude stone and wood, and channel mysterious energies by chanting. The middle section of the game exists largely to set up this duality, to show you an environment dominated by the Mudokon way in order to contrast it with everything else you’ve seen.

But even as it does this, it kind of undercuts it by making Abe monstrous. It’s in the middle section that you learn (if you haven’t figured it out already) that you have mind control powers. By chanting, you can take over the guards that patrol the factory. And it’s presented in a way that makes it clearly hostile and unpleasant for the host body: when you start chanting, the guards start running back and forth in agitation, yelling “Ow!” and “Help!”. And once you’ve got them, they don’t come back. When you’re done making a guard do what you want, the only way out is to make them explode. Now, these guards are highly unpleasant creatures, of a species called “Sligs”. They look kind of like squids riding cybernetic goat legs, they mutter about wanting to shoot people, and they sometimes beat the captive Mudokons for kicks (or out of frustration at their inability to shoot you). Nonetheless, however repulsive they may be, the act of dominating and then exploding them crosses a line. No one can claim to be simply a good guy once they’ve done that.

The new Humble Monthly brings me Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty, a remake of 1997’s Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee. I played the PC port of Abe’s Oddysee back in the day, and liked it enough to play the immediate sequel, Abe’s Exoddus, as well as to pick up further Oddworld games in Steam sales and then not play them. I understand the ones I haven’t played mix things up a bit, but the basic idea behind the Abe games is that they’re puzzle/action-platformers in an alien setting of juvenile grotesquery. The whole thing starts in a meat-processing plant, where Mudokons, the player character’s species, have just been downgraded from workers to meat animals, prompting the player to both escape and rescue as many of his kin as possible.

In contrast to D/Generation HD, I have to say that New ‘n’ Tasty largely improves on the original. I guess it’s helped by the way that the original was basically straining against its technology anyhow. Abe’s Oddysee had 2D sprites pre-rendered from 3D models. New ‘n’ Tasty can just put the 3D models directly in the game and render them at a higher resolution than those sprites. The original had occasional FMV transitions between locations, the better to give the illusion that everything was happening in a single cohesive space. NnT can actually move the camera around in that space. This is applied even in ordinary spaces: the original divided the world up into discrete screenfuls that the camera would jump between as you exited one and entered another, but NnT has the camera follow you continuously. This might make the bigger puzzles easier by removing the need to stitch together spaces in your head that are presented separately.

Rescuing Mudokons involves leading them to locations where you can open a portal. The game supports a simple set of commands for this: “Hello” to get the attention of whoever you’re facing, “Follow me”, “Stop”. In Abe’s Oddysee, you could only address one Mudokon at a time, and as a result sometimes had to go back and forth between where the Mudokons were gathered and where the portal is. Abe’s Exoddus added an “Everybody” command that allowed you to get an entire roomful of Mudokons to follow you at once. NnT retrofits this into the original scenario, and to get more mileage out of it, it increases the number of rescuable Mudokons threefold. There’s something to be said for this: to the extent that looking for Mudokons to rescue is a sort of treasure hunt, finding a whole bunch of them standing together feels more significant than finding one alone, even though there’s no practical difference for the completist player.

Where the original had instant death from every hazard, NnT introduces a health system that lets you take several hits. This is optional; if you play on Hard mode, the old one-hit kills apply. I think the health system probably makes for a better game, but I’ve been playing on Hard mode anyway, out of sheer stubbornness and a sense that if I beat the game this way once, I should be able to do it again. There are a lot of Mudokons hidden away in secret areas with specially-hard challenges, where you have to dodge spinning meat blades with exceedingly exact timing. I fail dozens of times in these areas before succeeding; some of them I’m not entirely convinced are humanly possible to pass except by luck. So health probably helps there.

Not that you’re really expected to complete all the challenge areas on your first pass through the game! You can pass through all the levels and reach an ending without rescuing a single Mudokon, although if I recall correctly, the ending you get that way basically scolds you and says “I guess you aren’t the Chosen One after all”. But there are Mudokons in the first chapter that you can only rescue by means of techniques taught in the later chapters. A more modern game would let you advance farther into the game, learn what you need to learn, then come back to save the Mudokons you left behind — possibly even letting you continue to try for perfection after getting the initial ending, like continuing to hunt for Riddler Trophies in Arkham Asylum after the final boss. But no, in Abe’s Oddysee, once you leave the first chapter, any Mudokons left behind are immediately killed. And New ‘n’ Tasty doesn’t change that.

Still very stuck on the same three puzzles in the third island segment of Stephen’s Sausage Roll, I decided to spend a little time on something different. I remember quite liking the MS-DOS version of D/Generation back in the day, and the recent HD remake was in a bundle, so I gave it a try.

The original D/Generation was something of a surprise for me. The box art made it look like some sort of dreary horror game, and the premise — that you’re tapped in a futuristic office building with a bunch of hostile globular mutations — sounded like a run-of-the-mill shooter. But in fact it’s mainly a game about solving door puzzles by triggering switches remotely by banking bullets off walls. Or at least the better parts of it are like that. Those are the parts I remember.

And, while I’m aware of how memory lies, I have to say that I think the original version was in some ways better. The HD can make it look more realistic, but realism wasn’t what I liked about it — quite the opposite! The original version’s stylized isometric pixel art may have cost it sales in 1991 (and is probably the reason for the misleading cover art), but it fit the game to a T. The environment is quite artificial and blatantly tile-based. The first two enemy types you encounter ¹That is, the A/Generation and the B/Generation are spheres and cylinders. This was a game styled around visual clarity, and the remake throws a lot of that away because it’s insufficiently appreciated.

Speaking of visual clarity, I really dislike the change to how walls a displayed. In the original, any wall or door that obstructed your view of a room interior was displayed as a cutaway, just a bar along the floor at approximately 1/4 the height of a full wall. In the remake, all walls are full-height, but turn transparent when you’re near them. The result is that you usually can’t see the full layout of a level when you enter it, and this interferes with my ability to immediately start making a plan of action.

The original had these green floor-mounted rotating turrets, part of the building’s security system that had been somehow turned against the humans. The remake reinterprets them as some sort of mutant worms with toothy mouths, even though they still behave like rotating turrets. In the very first room in the building, the remakers decided to add a gratuitous corpse, even though the mutants absorb their prey. Basically, it seems like they wanted the game to be Isometric System Shock. Whereas I want it to be more like Realtime DROD With a Laser Gun. (It even shares with DROD the mechanic of “special door that opens when there are no more monsters in the room”.) So yeah, I’m a little disappointed with their choices.

There’s one thing, however, that I’m disappointed was left exactly the same: limited lives. As in, if you get killed too much, you either load a save — a manual save, not an autosave — or you start the whole game over from scratch. This is not something I expect from a modern game. The only way to gain more lives is to rescue survivors, which has odd implications when you think about it. So I suppose there’s some motivation to leave lives in just as a way to make players want to rescue survivors. But honestly, you don’t have to bribe me like that. The “Survivors Remaining” count in the UI is enough to make me want to rescue them all.

The first of those two puzzles I mentioned in my last post finally yielded to copious use of process of elimination — I didn’t understand what I had to do until I had gone through everything that wouldn’t work. This opened up access to the rest of the game’s puzzles, which I made short work of, leaving only the other of the two, the one with the resonator.

I’ve mentioned the notion of formulating goals. To be clear, your ultimate goals in this game are usually obvious: get the larvae to their incubation chambers, plant all the gardens, free the whales, get your square to its goal spot, and so forth. But then you have obstacles. Let’s say you can’t reach a larva because it’s over on another structure, across a gap you can’t travel. This creates another goal: bridge that gap. For the most part, I felt like the low-level movement needed to accomplish goals in this game was the easy part, and that I only got really stuck when I couldn’t tell what the intermediary sub-goals were. But maybe that’s tautological.

Solving the resonator puzzle took an “Aha!” realization, and even with that, I didn’t fully understand why the solution worked before going over it in my mind in preparation for this blog post. It also requires a certain amount of reverse reasoning. This was possible because the puzzles in ECT are highly parsimonious, avoiding superfluous blocks and red herrings. Everything has a reason to be there, either as part of an obstacle or part of a solution. In most puzzles, if I didn’t see the purpose of a structure, it sufficed to just ignore it until its purpose became apparent, either because it was in my way or because I suddenly had a need of it. But in some cases, such as this one last puzzle, the path to a solution was unclear enough that imagining what a structure could be used for could clarify matters.

Many years ago, I made an attempt at classifying puzzles in games (and adventure games in particular) by the sorts of thought processes necessary for solving them. Such categories are necessarily vague, and many puzzles partake of more than one, but that doesn’t mean they’re not useful as descriptions. The main categories I came up with at the time were something like this: First, you’ve got those “Aha!” moments, the epiphanies that transform your understanding of the problem. Classically, riddles fit in this category. Then you’ve got puzzles based on the application of known rules. This is the domain of mazes and jigsaw puzzles. Finally, there’s my favorite group, puzzles where you don’t know the rules at first, and have to figure them out through experimentation. This is a sort of puzzle that’s almost exclusively seen in videogames. I don’t think this old taxonomy had a slot for the kind of backward reasoning I just described, so maybe that should be considered a fourth sort.

ECT runs the entire spectrum. Whenever a new game element is introduced, you have to play with it to figure out how it works. (There are in-game descriptions, but they don’t tell you everything.) Once you know the rules, you apply them. But every once in a while, there’s a puzzle that uses the rules in a way that you haven’t thought of. And that’s where the epiphanies come in. My understanding is that Stephen’s Sausage Roll is similar. I’ll be getting back to that shortly.

English Country Tune, as I’ve said, keeps adding new elements. Hole punches that punch holes in your square, together with obstacles that require the right holes in the right orientations. Freeze buttons that turn things you can push into things you can climb. Resonators, which can’t be adequately described in one pithy sentence. The final two worlds take all the elements that have been introduced so far and use them together in various ways.

I’m now up to the final world, where I have two puzzles available to me, but I’ve been stuck on them both for a little while. One involves a Resonator, easily my least favorite of the game’s things, as it introduces a time element into something that’s otherwise been comfortably turn-based. The other is inconvenient to navigate, but is otherwise benign. In both, I’m having difficulty formulating goals. Like, in the second one, I know I have to position a whale in such a way that it helps me push a larva into an incubation chamber that’s waiting for it, just because those are the only two moving objects on the level. But I don’t really see how that could work.

I’m getting kind of impatient to get through these two puzzles and see the rest of the puzzles they’re gating. It’s funny how that works. Am I liking the game? Yes, yes I am. Do I want it to last longer? No, I want to get it over with as quickly as possible. I guess it’s like gulping your food.

Replaying the beginning of English Country Tune for comparison purposes seems to have turned into playing the whole game. I only got a bit more than halfway through it when I first played it, and, aided by memories, I’ve already gotten well past that point. In the process, I’ve re-encountered one of the most interesting puzzles I’ve ever seen. Let me describe it.

First, understand that the player avatar in this game is a square, which moves about on the surface of an agglomeration of blocks by flipping end over end. There’s a puzzle set where you’re coated with green paint that plants seeds on contact with special “garden” tiles, causing a sort of abstract bush or something to sprout when you leave the tile, rendering that square impassible. Your goal throughout this set is to paint a bush on every garden tile. In other words, it’s a series of puzzles about covering a set of squares without retracing your path, just like the red trap door puzzles in DROD. The three-dimensionality adds an extra twist or two, but nonetheless, I personally have found this sequence to be by far the easiest part of the game. It is, however, followed by a much trickier set, in which your flippy square has green paint on only one side, so that it alternates between consuming tiles and not consuming tiles. Among other things, this means that you have to take advantage of the corners of blocks to switch your parity.

That’s interesting, but the really interesting puzzle is the first one in the one-sided set. Instead of the normal puzzle interface, the game gives you a simple level editor, and challenges you to create a one-sided-paint puzzle out of nothing but blocks with garden tiles on every exposed face, and then solve it. This is actually pretty tricky to do. Most simple shapes cannot be covered completely with an alternating paintbrush. Presumably the author noticed this in the course of developing the puzzles, and realized that the level design problem he was solving was a pretty good puzzle in its own right, worthy of inclusion in the game. I don’t think I’ve seen this sort of level-design puzzle elsewhere, and it’s something I’d be interested in seeing more of.

I’ve gotten far enough into the game to see one more instance of a puzzle that uses the level editor, but it’s not the same: it asks you to create a shape that interacts with the rules in a particular way, but doesn’t ask you to make a solvable puzzle.