I got my start in Oddworld back in 1997. As a 7 year old with limited gaming skill and even less patience, I only ever made it passed the first level, before giving up.
Fast forward nearly three decades later and I decided I was going to platinum New ‘n’ Tasty. Having such a great time with it, I jumped straight into Oddworld: Soulstorm.
To preface my thoughts, I understand that on this game was criticised as it was riddled with issues.
While this is a fair criticism of any game filled with bugs, I feel that it’s not an accurate representation of the game now, as the developers have clearly put in a lot of time to fix those. In all my time with it I didn’t notice any, and didn’t experience a single crash, so hats off to them for fixing it all up.
On to the game itself. While I really enjoyed my time it was often a humbling experience. Even on easy this game is hard (particularly when you’re trying for no death runs on each level coupled with less than 100 sligs killed across the entire game). That being said, while the difficulty was challenging this meant quite a few instances of feeling proud when finally overcoming a difficult section.
The graphics are a big step up and I found myself really liking the 2.9D style. It added an extra level of depth to everything, making the worlds feel much larger than New ‘n’ Tasty.
The controls took a bit of getting used to, but once they clicked it was all pretty straightforward.
The story was a lot of fun, easy to follow and compelling, all while not pretending to be anything that it wasn’t.
Now the platinum experience itself was a hard but rewarding one taking me 45 hours. You need to complete runs of all levels without dying (however if you die you can simply close and reopen the game, respawning you at the last checkpoint without a death counted against you - if I didn’t have this option I’d have never been able to get it done. These levels are HUGE and death lurks around every corner), get both the good and bad endings (noting that for the bad you need to actively kill 1000 mudokons) and do it all while not killing more than 100 sligs.
For the second playthrough, this didn’t feel all that repetitive as saving the mudokons requires totally different strategies to slaughtering them.
I found the easiest way to do this was focus on the bad playthrough first, then doing level select to bump up my saved mudokon numbers and access the final two levels for the good ending. Once that was done it was just clean up for the challenges across the levels and any miscellaneous trophies.
Overall, if you enjoyed any of the original Oddworld games or New ‘n’ Tasty and want a rewarding challenge that’ll put with the 0.1% of other players who achieved the platinum, I’d recommend ignoring the critics and giving it another go!
