You probably came in here expecting Mario Odyssey. Very well.

Mario Odyssey be gud!

As for what I'm actually reviewing, this is Oddworld: New 'n' Tasty!

While I was scouring the video game room for a game I knew that wasn't already reviewed (or that I didn't already review) my mind eventually traced back to this unique puzzle platformer game by I Honestly Don't Remember Nor Feel The Need To Look Up For The Sake Of A Gag...™. Something of note is that New 'n' Tasty is called New 'n' Tasty as it is a remake of the original game in the Oddworld series which I never actually knew about prior to the remake, but I'm certainly a fan now. Now as someone who watches something they like on Youtube, to which Youtube immediately responds by sending recommendations on why everything I enjoy in life is terrible, I know that game developers are not allowed to remake anything at all. I'm not sure what differences were in the original, Abe's Oddysee (that's how it's spelled), but I do know it was one of those classic early disc games, you know the one, the fuzzy clay looking graphics, the fantasy trope of an opening narrative with droning ambient music that obviously got compressed for disk space, classic.

So plot, this is Abe. You're probably wondering how he got in this situation of being suspended by chains, well it's a heck of a story. Basically the backstory of the world was that a big corporate enterprise run by a race called the glukkons took over and started harvesting animals to process into foodstuffs. I'm not exactly sure who's buying though. Abe and the rest of his race, the mudokons, have been enslaved to do manual labor in Rupture Farms. However, after lots of consumerism over a long period of time, the glukkons are about to run out of their main products, which leads them to their next plan. Fortunately Abe happened to be passing by the conveniently open door to the glukkon board room to hear about this new plan, processing the mudokons for food instead. Naturally this sends him into a state of shock, and he immediately decides to get out of the factory while he's a step ahead, and maybe save some of his people while he's at it.

Now when I was thinking up the script for this review, I wanted to identify a trademark I could associate with Oddworld, but that's actually pretty hard. Not because the game is unremarkable, actually it's the opposite. The game is just unique in many different ways. Like I mentioned before, it's a puzzle platformer, you have to find out how to get from start to finish as effectively as possible, like bridge constructor but without messed up physics or janky wins or any bridge building what so ever and a bunch of aliens. Abe is very unique as the playable character, he doesn't have any way to naturally defend himself, though every now and then he can pick up bottle caps or friggen grenades. Instead he has the power to control the minds of particular creatures, most notably the sligs, which are extra conveniently the main security unit of Rupture Farms and beyond. Of course this power isn't always available, but the game does encourage you going nuts with the poor guys running the place.

I already mentioned sligs, which are by far the most common threat aside from explosions I guess, most of them have guns, some have different behavior, all will basically attack you on sight. Other hostile aliens include feral scrabs, which are just sorta big hulking monsters you try to avoid at all costs, and slogs, which are basically slig pets. Think an angry bulldog chasing you down a street. Then there's the mines, either you have to jump around them or manually disable some to clear pathways for later use. You'll be running into electric fences, motion detecting gates, spinning blades, crushers, pits, slap me knickers the pits... but chances are you can get by somehow. Throughout the factory levels and various other secret warp levels, the real trial and prize is rescuing your fellow mudokons, almost always wiping some surface unopposed, or your corpse if it's stinking up the place. To rescue them you have to lead them to birds spinning around forming portals. Why? Eh. Of course they kind of do the whole lemming run thing, so you really need to make sure the way is clear before calling them over. How do you accomplish this mystical social interaction? With none other than THE REVOLUTIONARY GAMESPEAK ENGINE! Basically the pre-2000 way of saying "chat commands." They really give you free reign, get friends to follow, to wait, taunt the enemies at your leisure, and fart. Truly the pinnacle of game immersion. Believe me, you're going to want to save as many mudokons as you can for special "perks", which I can say are also unique to this particular series of games...

Ok, I never really liked the ratings we're required to give out, I'd much rather give a proper "pros and cons" list, but hey, I'll still give it a go.

Graphics: 7
Not only does the game have the potential of looking pretty good, the art style is very unique. Believe me, you see this game for a while, you could pick a character from it out of a crowd. Assuming the crowd involves video game characters, I mean it would be pretty obvious if a squid faced monster was walking around Target. Time to drop the bomb, this game was made with Unity. Boom.

Sound: 5
Like I said, droning disc music, has a tribal feel to it, and sometimes this aspect sounds more intense. There's also some "burpstep" mixed in here and there. I'm mainly giving props to all the amusing sound effects, from the grunty voices of sligs and mumbles of the mudokons, and all the little insults, minor swears, and giggles that accompany this.

Addictiveness: 8
"The game...... is fun." It has such ingenious concepts, with some other neat gimmicks that will become apparent and flood the world with personality and charm. You feel motivated to bypass intricate obstacle courses, and messing with enemies, and occasionally allies, is always amusing.

Story: 4
Just your typical tale about tyrannical oppression and the revolt of the working class, but then things start getting all spiritual and everything starts rhyming and it's just generally weird. Anyways the point of the game is to do your newly assigned job, free the peeps.

Depth: 6
New 'n' Tasty, from what I've gathered, actually has around three times the content or something compared to the original, so yeah, plenty of levels to wrap your head around, get a bunch of mudokons killed, then come back one day and find out how to be a proper social engineer. Jumping into mines is not the answer.

Difficulty: 7
It can get you stuck sometimes, but as it's a puzzle game, things like that can take time. Although they also incorporate some level of platform maneuvering, so if you're anything like me when I was 7, just wait 2 years to git gud.

OVERALL: 8.5

I can certainly end off on a positive note praising this game, as not only does it make itself unique in it's own bizarre ways, but the methods with which it accomplishes this just make the game work. Huh, fancy names for basic game mechanics, "it just works", was this game made by... Bethesda!?

Oh wait no, the producers are actually "Oddworld Inhabitants". So basically after Abe finished his journey he and a bunch of other goofballs sat around and designed a video game based on their lives. This game is officially an 8.6.