Another World at once feels modern and old style. There's no UX cruft on screen while playing, and the game lacks tutorials—after getting dropped into another world it's up to you to figure out what your two action buttons do, what holding them does, what using them while moving does. The clean pixel art style and the slick presentation, which transitions smoothly in and out of cutscenes, makes it almost feel like an indie game from today. Even it's pace, which moves between puzzle sequences, action/shooting sequences, and short breather exploration sequences, feels incredibly modern—a precursor to the AAA Zelda-likes like the new God of War or Naughty Dog games.

What has not aged as well is the way it feels to play. The puzzles can be annoyingly obtuse in the way adventure game puzzles are, but the real problem is the action and platforming segments that you have to get through to solve them. The absolute worst case of this was the cave section, in which you have to do running jumps over biting pits, some of which have tentacle curtains hanging over them that will also eat you. You have to stop, shoot them one by one with your charged shot, then you can give jumping over the pits a go. Pressing the jump button once while standing will jump over exactly one unit of the ground, which happens to be the same size as the teeth pits. The most annoying room in the game has one biting pit, one unit of normal ground, then two biting pits, so you have to complete a running jump over the first pit and then tap jump again exactly when you land so you can hop to the other side. This annoying room is also centered between two more platforming rooms, and if you die in any of them you're sent to the start of the first room—you have to run through that one, stop, kill the tentacles, try (and fail over and over) to do the long jumps, then jump over a pit and another biting pit in the next room, before making it to a checkpoint. And after you get that checkpoint, you have to do it all over again in the opposite direction. This section climaxes with a platforming section where you are being chased by water that will drown your character if it touches you, and I died over and over trying to get through it. (Another modern touch is the unique death cutscene/animations you get, which is exhausting because you will see them often.) Altogether the cave sequence was a real gauntlet of my patience, and made this short game feel long. That's the worst of the game, but not by much—there's frustrating segments like this throughout.

The platforming and action sequences have an arcade air to them—it certainly expects precision. But I felt like the game wasn't very responsive, and I'm honestly not sure if it actually isn't, or if it's a consequence of the port or what. It never felt good to play or snappy in the way that great arcade games can feel like. This obviously compounds the difficulty of the action sections.

Still I'm glad I played through this game. It's hard to recommend since it's so trying, but the highly modern presentation still feels really unique. The game's plot is a 80s Heavy Metal magazine-style empowerment fantasy—your cool programmer character explicitly drives a Ferrari, and there's even female alien nudity. If you're the kind of person who has a Backloggd account, you'd probably get something from playing through it, or watching a play through.

Reviewed on Mar 15, 2023


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