The sequel to Abe's Oddysee, Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus reprises and refines the strengths that made the first game so memorable. The atmosphere is as bleak as ever, but unexpected dark humor is never far away. The puzzles are possibly more imaginative than in the original, and the addition of the Kwiksave feature is a godsend. I do feel like I marginally prefer the first game though, and the reason lies in what they added (and didn't add) here.
Firstly, they added one disc (worth at least 4-5 hours of gameplay), but mostly in the form of fetch quests that don't add anything to the narrative, resulting in a two-disc quest that leans slightly more towards "tedious" than "epic".
There are some new game mechanics on display here. Perhaps fittingly, the most brilliant one is the additional utility of the fart button - farting next to a mudokon will cause them to move away from you and that is a useful tool in areas where your movement is restricted or you can't otherwise make them follow you in more conventional ways. Even better, because (minor spoiler!) the secret ingredient of Soulstorm Brew is mudokon bones and tears, there is enough soul in them for you to take a swig and then possess your own brew-fart. Being able to explore potentially dangerous areas as a disembodied fart cloud adds a nice layer of strategy on top of the previous game, besides being hilarious.
Not all of the added mechanics are quite as well thought out though. Mudokons you run into come with a variety of status ailments, most of which simply add busywork rather than strategy - angry and sad mudokons require that you say sorry to them before they listen to any of your instructions, but the game doesn't seem to explore this mechanic enough to warrant their inclusion. So, too, the inclusion of slurgs which can't harm you but squish loudly when stepped on, alerting other more dangerous creatures to your presence - their role in most puzzles seems to be to force you to wait for them to crawl away rather than force you to think.
The thing I most wish they changed (but they kept completely identical) was the overarching structure of the game. In Oddysee, saving mudokon slaves was optional to progress but essential to getting the good ending, and the game often gave you critical information to saving slaves several hours after it would have been useful. This meant that the typical experience of playing it would have been: get to the end, get the bad ending, start from the beginning with the information you now have and get the good ending. It worked a treat there, but it doesn't make as much sense in Exoddus - instead of being a newly-escaped slave trying to survive in an inhospitable world, you're now a lot less green (at least figuratively) and explicitly on a mission to save as many mudokons as possible. Besides, Exoddus is a significantly longer game so the two-playthrough structure really overstays its welcome.
Ultimately, it's essentially an expansion pack of the original game and that's not a bad thing at all; I thoroughly enjoyed myself and I'm confident fans of the first game would feel the same. Ironically though it comes across just a little bit like a bottle of Soulstorm brew: full of soul, and left me feeling just a bit bloated after.
Firstly, they added one disc (worth at least 4-5 hours of gameplay), but mostly in the form of fetch quests that don't add anything to the narrative, resulting in a two-disc quest that leans slightly more towards "tedious" than "epic".
There are some new game mechanics on display here. Perhaps fittingly, the most brilliant one is the additional utility of the fart button - farting next to a mudokon will cause them to move away from you and that is a useful tool in areas where your movement is restricted or you can't otherwise make them follow you in more conventional ways. Even better, because (minor spoiler!) the secret ingredient of Soulstorm Brew is mudokon bones and tears, there is enough soul in them for you to take a swig and then possess your own brew-fart. Being able to explore potentially dangerous areas as a disembodied fart cloud adds a nice layer of strategy on top of the previous game, besides being hilarious.
Not all of the added mechanics are quite as well thought out though. Mudokons you run into come with a variety of status ailments, most of which simply add busywork rather than strategy - angry and sad mudokons require that you say sorry to them before they listen to any of your instructions, but the game doesn't seem to explore this mechanic enough to warrant their inclusion. So, too, the inclusion of slurgs which can't harm you but squish loudly when stepped on, alerting other more dangerous creatures to your presence - their role in most puzzles seems to be to force you to wait for them to crawl away rather than force you to think.
The thing I most wish they changed (but they kept completely identical) was the overarching structure of the game. In Oddysee, saving mudokon slaves was optional to progress but essential to getting the good ending, and the game often gave you critical information to saving slaves several hours after it would have been useful. This meant that the typical experience of playing it would have been: get to the end, get the bad ending, start from the beginning with the information you now have and get the good ending. It worked a treat there, but it doesn't make as much sense in Exoddus - instead of being a newly-escaped slave trying to survive in an inhospitable world, you're now a lot less green (at least figuratively) and explicitly on a mission to save as many mudokons as possible. Besides, Exoddus is a significantly longer game so the two-playthrough structure really overstays its welcome.
Ultimately, it's essentially an expansion pack of the original game and that's not a bad thing at all; I thoroughly enjoyed myself and I'm confident fans of the first game would feel the same. Ironically though it comes across just a little bit like a bottle of Soulstorm brew: full of soul, and left me feeling just a bit bloated after.