Another World – 20th Anniversary Edition

Without a guide this game would have been a slog

Uumm… I know it’s a classic, and I’m totally into retro stuff, BUT I guess I just don’t have the patience anymore to struggle through those hardcore, frustrating trial-and-error puzzles. The controls are really old-school—in a bad way—there’s no story beyond “Escape from the alien planet,” and without a guide, you’d probably only figure out some solutions with endless patience and just as many retries. And unlike with, say, SuperMeatBoy, I don’t get that “♥♥♥♥ yeah!” feeling when I manage to pull something off—it’s more like, “For God’s sake, when will this torture finally end?” Those 4 hours felt more like 10. The graphics are nice, and the animations—typical of cinematic platformers and especially for the time—are very good. There’s no music (as far as I can remember), and the sound effects are… just there, repetitive, and quickly get on your nerves. Despite all the criticism, I’m “glad” that I’ve now experienced this piece of gaming history and have it behind me. It does look cool, and there are some cool sections too. But I can really only recommend it to gaming masochists. And short Steam Deck info: You have to navigate the starting menu with the touchscreen, any buttonpre…

The game is of course still amazing today, and largely worth playing even if it is an old-school quite difficult game that never holds your hand. However, this 20th anniversary version is quite buggy: - The display is broken if your system DPI / zoom is not set to 100% - I had issues with keyboard inputs remaining stuck (e.g. the character keeps running in a direction or keeps shooting) - The checkpoint system was reworked which would normally be a good thing to avoid some softlocks that were present in the original. However, when reloading a checkpoint, the game only keeps some of the actions you did and not others, so you sometimes have to redo actions you already did.

Another World is an important game in video game history. The game is also essentially created by one person (Éric Chahi) doing the game design, art and programming alone and only obtaining help for the soundtrack. Sometimes one person can carry out a unique vision to a finished product, which much larger teams would not be able to do. If you approach Another World as a piece of art, you will be happy. However, the gameplay can be extremely frustrating due to one-hit kills and because of the challenging difficulty level even on the easiest difficulty setting. This game is worth experiencing for the art and atmosphere alone.

Blast from the past!

Quite an interesting game with a few neat elements that make it fascinating to play in the modern day. While many people will probably be familiar with the Amiga original, and this is a faithful recreation of that game, there are portions which will delight old fans and intrigue the new. An adventure-action game to a lesser degree, only without much esoteric puzzle solving, the game features a young man being transported to an alien planet (intro movie) where he must work to escape the strange world. Death is fairly easy to come by, and each scene has a small mechanic that has to be overcome to proceed. I enjoyed the gameplay design that saw your character reset to the part of the scene in which they had to 'do something' in order to proceed, after a death. This means that while you think you've made progress sometimes, when you die, you return to a much earlier point and go, "Ah, I thought I'd finished this puzzle, but clearly I missed something." There are deceptive moments where you believe you’ve made progress but you’ve actually missed a crucial piece. The game isn’t long, by any stretch of the imagination, but it is comfortably challenging. It causes you to really think ab…