All of Oddworld can be yours for a pound or dollar
"I was employee of the year. Now, I’m dead meat."
The years pass and the animals perish and the oceans rise and the wealth gap widens and I repeatedly think to myself through a fug of nitrogen oxide, Steam discounts and microplastic sediment, “man, those Oddworld games were excellent, weren’t they”. If you've yet to have the pleasure, you can scoop up the entirety of the squalid anti-capitalist satire universe on Fanatical right now for a pound or dollar. It's been a while since I read Theses on Feuerbach, but I'm pretty sure that counts as praxis?
Released in 1997 for Personable Computers and the PlayableStation, Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee is the story of a Mudokon meat factory worker with his mouth sewn shut who overhears plans to convert the entire workforce into popsicles. It’s a single-screen 2D platformer in which your skills consist of jumping, pulling levers, communicating by means of a once-touted GameSpeak system, farting, and praying.
Oh, how you’ll pray, for you have all the offensive capacity and resilience of a McDonalds salad. Threats include gun-toting Sligs and their miniature T-Rex guard dogs, handsy herds of Paramites, and the viciously territorial Scrabs. The nearest you get to fighting back is possessing the bodies of other creatures and making use of their capabilities.
Survival rests on manipulating the puzzle-game workings of each screen so as to bypass or isolate dangers, often by the skin of your teeth. Death is frequent, and gruesomely funny. Abe might be gaming’s ultimate fallguy. Also funny: watching a crowd of Mudokons squeakily tip-toe past a sleeping sentry. Aside from getting the hell out of Rupture Farms, the game calls on you to play a mixture of local messiah and union organiser – commanding and guiding your fellow labourers to mystic portals formed by flocks of birds, while trying not to get them mulched, eaten, blown up, and so forth.
Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus is in some ways a remake, fleshing out the Mudokon communication aspect and turning in a grander plot involving a ghastly new mind-altering soft drink. Mudokons now have emotional states - they'll get angry, wired, depressed or sick, which means you now have to worry about your allies running around giggling or getting into possibly-fatal slapfights. I think Exoddus is the better game than Oddysee, the one they really wanted to make, but they’re both terrific, with tumid, desolate industrial environments made up of pipes and chasms and LED displays.
The later Oddworld games are more of a mixture. Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath is the standout, a cult Wild Western shooter in which your bullets are squirming critters. Oddworld: Munch's Oddyssey is an imperfect departure into full 3D platforming. I never got round to playing the 2.5D series reboot Oddworld: Soulstorm, but I hear it's a bit ropey.
I’m not sure I need a new Oddworld game right now, but I’d like to play more games that recall this particular blend of gallows humour, apocalyptic gloom and ingenuity. If you’d like to recommend an Oddworld spiritual successor, I’m all ears.