Oddworld: Soulstorm released in April this year for PC via Epic Games Store and PS4 and PS5. The game was also a part of the PS Plus lineup of games during its launch month, and is launching on Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and Xbox Series S at a later date. Other details on the matter remain scant for now, and fans are clamoring to know whether the game will be a part of Xbox Game Pass at launch – or not.

This announcement is by no means a surprise, since Oddworld‘s exclusivity was of course, timed. An ESRB rating for the game on Xbox platforms suggested something along these lines some time ago.

pic.twitter.com/gwXYpsh5S7

— Oddworld (@OddworldInc) August 18, 2021

Despite the prevalence of explosives, SMGs and pistols, Sniper Elite VR still retains the sniping gameplay that’s made the series a success. It takes place in 1943 Italy with the Resistance battling against the Nazis across 18 missions in the campaign. You could go all out and mow down enemies or utilize stealth and find the right opportunity (movement is free rather than guided).

When utilizing a rifle, wind direction and ballistics will need to be taken into account. But pull off a particularly nasty shot and the X-Ray Kill Cam goes to work, showcasing the destruction in slow motion. Stay tuned for more details on the title in the meantime.

It should be overwhelming and bloated, but Soulstorm is a masterwork of streamlining and slowly eking out various options and abilities to player one at a time, so that you get every chance to properly get used to the newest addition to your arsenal before you’re challenged to use it in unending permutations with everything else you already knew you could do by some deviously challenging, finely crafted scenarios. Speaking purely mechanically, Oddworld Soulstorm is almost shockingly well accomplished at pretty much everything it sets out to do.

There are some stumbles. Some of these are intended – such as the sheer stupidity of the Mudokons you are tasked with rescuing, managing whose safety in their utter lack of self preservation instinct can be where a lot of the game’s challenge often comes from. Then there are those, on the other hand, that are decidedly unintended, such as in the crafting system, which is wholly unnecessary busywork that serves more to break the pace than anything, or the times the game actually has the audacity to tie your fortunes to the Mudokons. You can end up missing a perfect run on a level through no fault of your own because the Mudokons are very literally the dumbest beings to have ever occupied the annals of history (fictitious or otherwise), or you can be forced to often – shudder – rely on their assistance in combat and stealth scenarios, in which case, good luck.

"Soulstorm is a masterwork of streamlining and slowly eking out various options and abilities to player one at a time, so that you get every chance to properly get used to the newest addition to your arsenal before you’re challenged to use it in unending permutations with everything else you already knew you could do by some deviously challenging, finely crafted scenarios. Speaking purely mechanically, Oddworld Soulstorm is almost shockingly well accomplished at pretty much everything it sets out to do."

Those stumbles, as mentioned, are more infuriating than they should be because of just how well realized this game is otherwise. Frankly, I am impressed with the sheer mastery over mechanical design and prowess that Soulstorm exhibits on a consistent basis, and it’s that level of its mastery that allows it to get away with the crushing difficulty the series is known for – because no matter how many times you die, it never actually feels unfair. Repeated failures only feel like well earned penalties for your own impatience, or lack of understanding of all elements in a scenario, as well as how you can best leverage them, or just plain and simple misfires of execution.

Soulstorm ends up being one of those rare games where, even when you fail, you end up going right back into it, because just one more attempt and this time you’ll know how to get past that chokepoint with so many enemies blocking the way damn it. It’s the ideal of “die and try again” realized to its peak potential. Thanks to the SSD, load times between multiple attempts cease to be a factor, and you’re jumping right back into things with no friction whatsoever impeding you. The game’s extremely well designed checkpoint system, which liberally doles out saves after pretty much every encounter, also means that death doesn’t set you back at all. You just have to repeat that one encounter from the start, except this time you’re armed with the knowledge of what went wrong, and how to prevent it. Marvelous, really. It’s definitely one of my favorite uses of checkpointing in a game, because it works beautifully in tandem with most of the other systems and the player’s intrinsic progress to craft difficulty that actually feels fair.

Of course, the qualifier above means there are caveats here. For example, the game’s checkpointing doesn’t take into account any crafting or even item hotswapping, meaning you’re adding needless busywork in between attempts by making players repeat all that every single time. Oddworld Soulstorm’s menus aren’t bad, to be honest, but no menu in the history of menus has been so good as to justify that you spend as much time in it as Soulstorm can often demand from its players.

While that isn’t a small criticism (to be frank, it’s probably almost singularly responsible for my dislike of the crafting system), at the very least I can say that it never makes the game feel unfair. Mind numbingly tedious, yes, but unfair, no. Of course, things can be different when the game punishes you for how dumb the Mudokons can be, because at that point a lot of the things you are punished for are very literally not in your control. It can also be similarly frustrating when bugs or glitches end up ruining a lot of your progress (to Soulstorm‘s credit, it’s been patched to have a lot of its glitches addressed, because at launch, it was a fair bit of a mess).

"No matter how many times you die, it never actually feels unfair. Repeated failures only feel like well earned penalties for your own impatience, or lack of understanding of all elements in a scenario, as well as how you can best leverage them, or just plain and simple misfires of execution. Soulstorm ends up being one of those rare games where, even when you fail, you end up going right back into it, because just one more attempt and this time you’ll know how to get past that chokepoint with so many enemies blocking the way damn it."

This, again, rankles as much as it does because it’s all an unforced error – elsewhere, Soulstorm is very literally pristinely designed, and works with all its various elements coming together in a way that very few other games on the market can boast of. So that it then shoehorns the tedium of an unnecessary crafting system, or that it fails to account for said crafting system with its checkpointing system, or that it needlessly ties player progress to the Mudokons more acutely than it should, or that it simply isn’t as polished as it should be, hurts. Because when everything in this game is working, it is working like few other games manage.

One of the great things that can help players persevere even at the game’s worst, when the systems and bugs are working against you (which, to be fair, doesn’t actually happen too often) is the story and storytelling. Oddworld has an incredibly richly realized setting, and Soulstorm goes more into it than any game in the past has managed, with some distressingly macabre humor, some pretty unsubtle commentary on class warfare, environmentalism, and capitalism, and some charming characters, backed with some glorious voicework, that can make sticking with it worth it.

They also indirectly contribute to the frustration sometimes, because did you know, the game has multiple endings, and they are tied to how many of the Mudokons you manage to save. Yes, you can probably see where I’m going with this – that you’re challenged to save all the Mudokons to get the best ending means that you might get more invested in trying to save them than you otherwise would be, which makes those failures that much more infuriating. Thankfully, the good ending and the best ending aren’t too different, so you can get by with the more lenient requirements for the former than the latter, but yeesh.

"Oddworld has an incredibly richly realized setting, and Soulstorm goes more into it than any game in the past has managed, with some distressingly macabre humor, some pretty unsubtle commentary on class warfare, environmentalism, and capitalism, and some charming characters, backed with some glorious voicework, that can make sticking with it worth it."

The great world and story of the game is bolstered by the genuinely great presentation as well. As I’ve mentioned already, the voice acting is delightful, but the game also looks and sounds great. It’s not a next gen showpiece, but it looks good, backed up by some really strong art as well. The audio side of things is great too, though more on the voice work and effects side than on the music side (which isn’t to say the music is bad, it’s not, it just doesn’t stand out like so many other things in the game do).

Oddworld: Soulstorm ends up being a very good and very compelling game, that legitimately threatens to be an all time classic so often, you can’t help but be angry at it for not following through. That it stumbles where and when it does does not in the slightest take away from all that the game achieves, and just how well it achieves it, of course, and Soulstorm is without a doubt the best and most welcoming game in the series, not to mention the best rounded out one. And honestly, the fact that most of my frustrations from the game stem from it not managing to be utterly sublime all the time should, more than anything else, speak volumes about the quality of the core game, when it’s firing on all cylinders.

This game was reviewed on PlayStation 5.

NOTE: This interview was conducted prior to the game’s launch.

"When Outright Games came to us with the idea for this game, we all agreed Scrat was the best main character to go with, as to be honest, I think he’s the funniest character in the franchise."

From this franchise’s entire roster of characters, why did you choose to make a game revolving around Scrat?

When Outright Games came to us with the idea for this game, we all agreed Scrat was the best main character to go with, as to be honest, I think he’s the funniest character in the franchise.

Being a game that places such an emphasis on platforming, level design is something that’ll be very important to the entire experience. Can you talk us through the philosophies that have defined this game’s level design?

We had a number of rules that we worked with, one of the main ones was strangely, humour. We set up the levels so that Scrat’s unique abilities came into play. We also tried to use the environments, we knew that some of the levels would be based on environments from the movies, so we thought about this during that planning stage.

Can you talk to us about what sort of power ups and abilities we’ll be unlocking throughout the game?

The game is set across 5 environments split into various sets of levels and as you progress through the game you unlock an ability after each set of levels. Not wanting to give too much away I can say that the first ability is the double jump, so you can now reach higher locations/platforms than you could before. With each of these abilities you can go back and re-explorer earlier levels to get collectibles or other hidden items. My favourite ability is unlocked about halfway through the game and utilizes the kind of humour I mentioned previously.

Beyond the critical path stuff, does Scrat’s Nutty Adventure offer many optional objectives or leave room for exploration?

Definitely, as I hinted at, if you want to 100% the game you will need to explore various nooks and crannies in the levels, but for those, you will need all the abilities you gain through the game.

Will we be visiting a lot of locations that fans of the films will be familiar with? 

We have a few locations based on parts of the movies, mainly in the look of the environments rather than specific locations.

"Our story is based on something that was hinted at in the movies, let’s call it a greater intelligence, or a “past” and our story is entirely based on that."

Conversely, can we expect to see many new locations and landscapes in the game as well?

Yes, the story is entirely focused around something that was touched on very briefly in the latter films, as such we’ve sort of opened up the Ice Age universe and as players make their way through the game there will be nods and winks to this.

How are you striking the balance between taking cues from the films and adding original new content?

Great question, so our story is based on something that was hinted at in the movies, let’s call it a greater intelligence, or a “past” and our story is entirely based on that. We were actually in contact with Lori Forte over at BlueSky Studios regarding the story, we put in a couple of suggestions for the direction we would go in and went with this one. Lori was instrumental in moving ahead with the story and helping us to get the overall arc finialised.

About how long is an average playthrough of Scrat’s Nutty Adventure going to be?

For a new player, a normal playthrough will be around 5-6 hours, with a 100% run being upwards of 8hrs. If you’re going to speed run it and not collect any of the extras you could probably do it in 3-4hrs and we’re excited to see the community try and set some impressive records on this. Saying all this, we’ve built this game for kids aged 6-12 years old, so we would expect this play time to be even longer as they take the time to explore this beautiful detailed world to explore.

Games like this rely on replay value. How are you ensuring that this will be the case here?

As I mentioned, you’ll need go back and forth through the game when you acquire new abilities to be able to find a lot of collectibles and extras. We’ve put in little semi-hidden secrets, so the player will see stuff and think ‘how do I get that?’. Then when they get an ability later on think “of course!”. As such we have a fast travel system in place, where at the start of each section there’s a pad that the player can use to access the map and return to areas they’ve been to previously.

Will the game feature Xbox One X specific enhancements? Is 4K/60fps on the cards?

We didn’t prioritise the inclusion of any Xbox One X specific items in our game, but who knows, we might look at it in the future if there’s enough call for it.

And how will the PS4 Pro version turn out in terms of resolution and frame rate?

PS4 is 1080p on the base hardware and 1440p on PS4 Pro. The FPS is locked at 30p as we were more interested in resolution stability.

"On base hardware, it’s 30fps on all platforms with various resolutions. Xbox One is 900p on base and 1080p on Xbox One X. With PS4 being 1080p on base and 1440p on PS4 Pro."

How is the game running on the original Xbox One and PS4, frame rate and resolution wise?

On base hardware, as I mentioned it’s 30fps on all platforms with various resolutions. Xbox One is 900p on base and 1080p on Xbox One X. With PS4 being 1080p on base and 1440p on PS4 Pro.

What is the resolution and frame rate of the Switch version in docked and undocked modes?

On Switch it’s 720p in docked and undocked. We’re doing a tremendous amount visually on the system and really pushing the limits there while aiming for a consistent 30 FPS.

Rebellion Developments, known for its Sniper Elite franchise, is heading to E3 2019. It recently announced its line-up for the show, which includes a “major unannounced new title”. This will be unveiled at the PC Gaming Show, which airs at 10 AM PST on June 10th.

Other titles that we can look forward to include Evil Genius 2 for PC and Sniper Elite VR. Announced in June 2017, Evil Genius 2 will be showcased for the first time at the PC Gaming Show. More details on the gameplay will also be provided.

Sniper Elite VR is being developed with Just Add Water. Along with being showcased for the first time, attendees can go hands-on with the title. How will the game’s visceral shooting translate over to virtual reality? We’ll have to wait until E3 2019 to find out. The show will take place from June 11th to 13th, but several publishers Electronic Arts and Microsoft will host pressers before the floor officially opens.

We're delighted to confirm that we're going to be bringing THREE titles to @E3 2019;

✅Evil Genius 2
✅Sniper Elite VR
✅A MAJOR UNANNOUNCED NEW TITLE

To book a press appointment, please email press@rebellion.co.uk pic.twitter.com/7BEMWWt8Tf

— Rebellion (@Rebellion) May 31, 2019

Micro Machines: World Series is that kind of game, flawed deeply with charm despite itself. I can’t help but love the art design and imaginative locations that bring you into that feeling of being a kid again, whipping your little cars around the attic workbench and sending them flying down the stairs or into each other. There’s a childish cohesion to the chaos and that is where the game shines the most.

"Micro Machines World Series feels slippery and like you never quite have full control."

World Series takes the form of a top down racer, mimicking the viewpoint that you have playing with the physical toys. They have all the control of a toy car too, which is to say not much. In contrast to Mantis Burn Racing which nailed the control but lacked almost everything else, Micro Machines World Series feels slippery and like you never quite have full control. You’ll point yourself around the 10 tracks or 15 battle maps and love the fun and varied locations, but frequently I became frustrated when I didn’t nail a turn quite like I felt I should have, watching other cars rocket ahead of me.

There is no single player championship to speak of in World Series, instead going all in on the online modes of play. Micro Machines World Series does smartly keep you from waiting in the menu too long by filling out slots in any game type with bots should no humans be around, and can drop some in mid match as they join.

The bots might be a little too smart, with no option to change the difficulty. They seem to be able to stick pretty close to the racing line and have nearly flawless aim with the weapons. Playing with other people such as the colleague I had cohered into this with me, does mitigate the problems somewhat as they’ll also be fighting the controls to various degrees, bringing the game more in line with the casual zaniness that it’s aiming for.

"Battle mode shares the same inventive location designs such as a garden or the drone workbench, and opens them up to wide flowing arenas"

Racing around the courses plays a lot like a Mario Kart, where you’ll do your best to stick to the best racing line while dodging and using a handful of fun, Nerf branded items such as gattling guns and squeaky hammers. Shortcuts can be found on each track, though items play no part in accessing them so once found they really just become the defacto method of racing.

Battle mode shares the same inventive location designs such as a garden or the drone workbench, and opens them up to wide flowing arenas with multiple paths and shortcuts that can launch you to key points. There are team deathmatch, king of the hill and bomb delivery modes which all change up the game in a few ways. Instead of relying on the same items, the 12 different vehicles are all outfitted with different load outs, including an ultimate earned by completing the goal and destroying enemies.

This does allow each vehicle to fit into its own niche, the ambulance is the healer, the tank is…the tank, the hot rod is the quick damage dealer, ect. Unfortunately the same controls issues hamper the otherwise excellent battle experience way too much. The quick movement that the battle mode asks for you to dodge enemy fire or quickly spin around to the objective or catch the moving bridge just isn’t a possibility and the struggle makes the entire mode more frustrating than it needs to be.

"you’ll level up for what bragging rights might be there, in game currency and of course loot boxes, because they’re the new scourge of gaming in 2017."

What is there to earn from participating in the online only shenanigans? Beyond the fun of seeing the different arenas and their environmental hazards such as the Hungry Hungry Hippos board, you’ll level up for what bragging rights might be there, in game currency and of course loot boxes, because they’re the new scourge of gaming in 2017. All of this to facilitate cosmetic changes you can apply to the 12 playable vehicles in the game, which is fine in and of itself, but doesn’t give the game an overarching sense of progression like unlocking new racers. You’ll have seen everything World Series has to offer within the first few hours.

Micro Machines: World Series has such inventive environments and a striking art design to bring it all alive, it’s really just a shame that the act of playing it isn’t all that fun thanks almost completely to loose controls. The online focused game is currently already nearly dead, removing the little worth the game had unless you want to talk friends into buying this somehow, just know that when we did that, it wasn’t much fun.

This game was reviewed on Playstation 4

Just Add Water has had a significant amount of experience with working on the PS4 and Xbox One what with Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty releasing for the former a year ago and then arriving on the latter this year. On speaking to the developer before, there was plenty of excitement for the PS4.

With the game arriving on PS4, a new generation in itself, and enough time passes before coming to the Xbox One, what kind of challenges did the developer face? GamingBolt spoke to director Lorne Lanning about the same and he also extensively noted the difference between both platforms.

“As the creative director, not so much. There’s obviously some spec differences that people have touted, written about, fully analyzed, and it’s all out there to look at. If you were the lead programmer, you might give a different story than what I’m giving you because I was the creative director. But through the Xbox, the architecture was not that different. And the power range was in the zone enough that it was not so challenging and effort– it wasn’t easy. The reason it wasn’t easy is because we targeted our first platform as PS4. We did that for various reasons. Our largest audience is on PlayStation. And PlayStation looked eager to give us some visibility, which we live and die by that and we can’t afford it.

“We don’t buy airtime, we can’t afford it. We make good games that someone is willing to promote for us. Because of that we were building games the old dumb way. Which is just trying to get to your first spec and utilizing whatever you had to do on a machine to get it to work. Then coming to other platforms, it’s not the way you should architect for multiple platforms. You should architect from the beginning: what is your full slate of platforms you’re going after? Then you should deduce: how should we make the first platform that goes to the other platforms the easiest? And we didn’t do that. Even though we’re using Unity– if you put in a ton of assets and you’re running a lot of data– Let me say it this way: Unity promotes itself as being a multi-SKU game engine. And if you made a simple mobile game that runs on a wide array of mobile devices, it would be very easy to bring that game to every platform. If you built a simple mobile game that would go to Xbox One, and PS4, and Wii U, and Vita as a breeze.

“You’re not using anymore– the little bit of computing power that it needs to run on your basic iPhone is surpassed by all the consoles. So you’re bringing a small package into more powerful consoles. That’s a really smart way to use an engine to get to all the multiplatforms. The really dumb way is what we did. Which is you try to get that top platform. PS4 is a high– when the tech company does the deduction, they come back and say, “it’s got this more power here and there in a couple different places.” Not vast differences. But if you did it to totally push and exploit all PS4s performance abilities, going to Xbox One you’re not accounting for how their architecture was, so it’s harder. But I’m saying that’s harder for us. It’s not necessarily that it’s harder in general. It ‘s hard because we really were milking the PS4 through Unity’s ability.

“That was not a multi-threaded ability. When you look at New ‘n Tasty it’s built, not really take advantage of the multiple chip sets and the way that that array is being used. They call it multi-threaded for environments. Unity wasn’t really taking advantage of multi-threaded environment and that meant– they have now. That’s what Unity 5 was about. Without the multi-threaded environment meant we were just trying to squeeze out the extra bells and whistles, and effects, and visual qualities, transparencies, out of what we could work with in more of a single-threaded architecture that wasn’t taking advantage of the powers of the machine. In the same way, the same thing can be said for Xbox One. Meaning, because of the core technology, it was not designed to fully exploit the powers of that machine. And we can say the same for Vita, and the same for Wii U.

“And the same for PC. It just wasn’t designed to fully exploit the latest in console power. But who’s complaining with the price, right? Meaning, in the past you’d spend millions of dollars on engines and it wasn’t as good as Unity. So I’m grateful there. But when it comes to going to the other platforms there were lots of difficulties. But a lot of that is chalked up to our own planning and execution failures. Failures is a strong work. But that’s how you should measure it in hindsight: Where did we fail, where did we succeed? Going forward we don’t want to have that same problem. We’re coming up for release on Wii U, and Wii U is more challenging for the reasons I just described. Nintendo is traditionally focused on a type of twitch gameplay. Since the Wii it’s had a special controller. It hasn’t tried to stay largely compatible with cross platform release strategies for publishers.”

What are your thoughts on this? Let us know in the comments below, and we’ll continue to explore the differences between both platforms as time goes on.

Such exposition makes the development of Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty all the more intriguing because it’s indicative of today’s tools and infrastructure being used to not only bring old-school concepts to the new generation but to also circumvent many of the restrictive policies that have dogged studios for decades. Take the Unity engine for example, which helped streamline New ‘n’ Tasty’s development to an amazing degree. Just Add Water founder Stewart Gilray has talked about how the previous engine for development would have cost $100,000 to develop New ‘n’ Tasty on while Unity only cost $5000 for licensing.

Unfortunately, this isn’t Unity 5 we’re talking about since that engine released for free only a few weeks (or months depending on your platform) before the release of New ‘n’ Tasty on all platforms. Unity 4.3 is in effect and has been heavily customized, taking some features from versions 4.5 and 4.6, but features like improved PhysX support, physically based rendering, Geomeric’s Enlighten, global illumination and deferred rendering are all missing. This isn’t to say that Unity 4.3 doesn’t provide its fair share of benefits to the game though as the physics, visuals and overall performance are far improved over the base game. But we’ll get to that.

As noted several times before, this isn’t a remaster of the original Abe’s Oddysee but a remake crafted from the ground up using the original as a base. One of the most important changes to Oddworld gameplay see in New ‘n’ Tasty is continuous scrolling versus a flip screen style of presentation. This essentially means that levels are continuously streaming in real-time rather than segments or “pages” that players can return to.

A native 1080p resolution is used on both the Xbox One and PS4 with both games boasting a frame rate of 60 frames per second. As so happens, however, that frame rate isn’t quite locked – it sees its share of dips, sometimes between 50 to 55 FPS. These dips are more frequent on the Xbox One than the PS4. In terms of visuals though, it’s amazing to note the parity of quality across all platforms thanks to the Unity engine.

All three versions of the game employ fast approximate anti-aliasing (FXAA) which smooths out jaggies substantially but still aids the game’s pre-rendered look. Cut-scenes are now rendered in real-time though they’re still capped at 30 frames per second (yes, even on PC oddly enough). The PC version does have smoother edges compared to the consoles due a higher grade of FXAA being used and this definitely results in less jaggies overall.

However, only eagle-eyed observers will really notice the difference – all three versions boast the same image quality and look incredibly good. Texture detail and object geometry is also similar across all platforms. Though global illumination may be missing, Unity 4.3 does use a number of different light sources in New ‘n’ Tasty to make the world come alive. The overall improved physics ensure more realistic movement for both Abe and his enemies while the various details adorning each environment feel more distinguishable and alive.

The PC version does have its advantages though especially in frame rate performance. On testing Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty on an Intel Core i5 3.2 GHz with an Nvidia Geforce GTX 770 and 16 GB of RAM, we managed a solid 60 frames per second with no drops and no judder.

All in all, Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty doesn’t just show off the potential for a high quality remake using a cost-efficient yet highly powerful and scalable engine. It also serves as a stellar example of a singular engine ensuring the same visual quality across all platforms (with some differences in frame rate performance, of course). We’re suitably excited to see what Just Add Water could do with Unity 5 and hopefully, if The Brutal Ballad of Fangus Klot ever does get made, we can finally get a look at how the engine’s various bells and whistles look in the Oddworld universe. We also wouldn’t mind an upgrade for Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty to Unity 5 similar to what inXile Entertainment is doing with Wasteland 2: Director’s Cut for the Xbox One, PS4 and PC.

Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty in its current state though is as fine a remake as they come though. The upgrade to visuals and gameplay without significantly overhauling the charm that set Abe’s Oddysee apart from its blockbuster brethren is very much apparent. The PC version is of course the platform of choice thanks to its FXAA implementation and better 60 FPS performance but on the console side, we’d opt for the PS4 since it witnesses less frame drops and judder than the Xbox One.

Bill Smith carried out the performance analysis of the game.

Remember when Just Add Water boss Stewart Gilray spoke to the PS Nation Podcast about a “certain someone’s team” helping to finish development on Sony’s The Last Guardian? And that certain someone was assumed to be PS4 lead architect Mark Cerny? In a statement to GamingBolt, Gilray clarified his stance completely.

On being asked if it was really happening according to him – that is to say, if Gilray has first-hand knowledge of Cerny working on The Last Guardian, he stated, “Not at all…this is my assuming based upon various public facts…

“Cerny spoke about TLG last year saying it’s definitely still happening. It’s a TOKYO Studio project. Ueda-san even said the TLG team was working on Knack with Cerny.

“Adding all these elements together it seems like a good bet that he, or at least his team is involved, wouldn’t you say?” Gilray also stated that his statements from on the PS Nation Podcast were misconstrued.

It’s an interesting stance but again, far from direct confirmation of Cerny working on The Last Guardian. Take the game’s existence with a grain of salt for now but as Gilray says, it wouldn’t be completely absurd if Cerny was involved.

Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty is a remake of the classic side scrolling puzzle platformer. Every area has been beautifully rebuilt from the ground up to take advantage of modern hardware. This isn’t just an HD port, it is clear that a lot of time and effort went into retrofitting the game with modern graphical prowess.

"This isn’t just an HD port, it is clear that a lot of time and effort went into retrofitting the game with modern graphical prowess. "

Unfortunately the game is rough around the edges, as I encounter numerous bugs and glitches in my playthrough, including a game ending glitch where my save was corrupted around the halfway point. Other glitches included crashing to the PS4 home page, freezing at load screens, Abe getting stuck on geometry, and a very frustrating instance where pressing a button to activate a password stone caused my character to be teleported back to the start of the level. Add to that the fact that in the opening video of the game a “Trial version” watermark  can clearly be seen in the corner for a few seconds, and it is easy to come to the conclusion that this game needed some more time in the oven.

Throughout the game players will encounter other Mudokons whom they can save by activating near-by portals with the shoulder buttons. Be careful however, as the Mudokons will mindlessly run towards the portal once its open, often times to their peril if the player hasn’t deactivated traps or cleared enemies along the way. Sometimes you will need to speak to them using the “gamespeak” feature, which is a set of commands mapped to the directional pad. With this you can communicate with the Mudokons to ask them to follow you, or stop and wait. Later on in the game this feature is used to give sequential passwords to gatekeepers in order to progress to new areas. In each chapter you are ranked on how many Mudokons you save, and if you save them all you will obtain the best ending.

New ‘n’ Tasty isn’t a game about combat, in fact there really isn’t any to speak of. Abe has no attacks, he can only run, crouch, roll, jump, wave, chant, and fart for the most part. The trick is to use these skills to navigate and solve areas and the puzzles within. The world of Oddworld is filled to the brim with monsters and machines that would like nothing more than to turn you into a neatly stacked pile of meat. In other words, you are going to die a lot in this game, and thats the way it is intended. Players will need to be aware of their environment and careful to avoid it’s many pitfalls. The main complaint I have is that it takes too much time to reload a checkpoint considering how easy it is to die. The screen can hang for almost 7 seconds at time and it really ruined the pacing for me.

"New ‘n’ Tasty isn’t a game about combat, in fact there really isn’t any to speak of. Abe has no attacks, he can only run, crouch, roll, jump, wave, chant, and fart for the most part. "

This game comes from a time when platformers were still designed with arcade philosophies. They were sometimes unfair, or harder than usual because you paid per play. Since then, as consoles pushed the arcade market out of commission the logic has changed quite a bit on this. That isn’t to say that the difficulty of the game is a bad thing, but some sections can feel like they needed a bit of play testing to smooth them over. For instance the first two chapters seem to be some of the hardest parts in the game, with things getting a lot easier once you leave the meat factory.

Unfortunately modern side-scrollers make Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty feel like a dated slog. If the developers were going to remake the game for a new audience, they should have maybe included latter day side-scrolling innovations, instead of producing largely the same journey with better visuals. This is a case of being a little too faithful to the source material. The developers have also added a new leaderboard feature for speed-runners and long time fans to see how fast they can complete the game and how many Mudokons they can save, but this is one of the only new features in this remake, and it is rather disappointing.

Ultimately fans of the franchise will find this to be a faithful remake of a classic video game, but it’s dated gameplay, design philosophies, and substantial technical problems make it hard to recommend to newcomers. For such an interesting and imaginative world, it is disappointing that playing the game just isn’t very enjoyable.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 4.