Oddworld : Abe's Exoddus
Eternal Cuddly Game #3
Type of Game
A heroic cloak-and-dagger quest, with breeches instead of a cloak.
Release date on our machines
January 1989 on Japanese arcade terminals. Or June, or May, nobody on the internet seems to agree. November 1990 on Mega Drive, on the other hand, is the consensus.
Developer
Makoto uchida, in cooperation with Team Shinobi, and er... Well, SEGA, to put it simply.
Publisher
SEGA Enterprises ltd. for the Arcade and Mega Drive, Virgin Mastertronic ltd. for the Atari ST. Better known as Virgin Entertainment UK, or the company acquired by Titus in 2003.
Golden Axe: available on the Mega Drive Mini (for those who own it), the SEGA Genesis Nintendo Switch Online (so many inconsistencies in that string of words), on the Google Play Store and the Apple Store in its Golden Axe Classics version (the three 16-bit games rolled into one).
At Dad's house, at the very end of 1997, the Master System was directly replaced by the PlayStation, without going through the 16-bit stage. What a technological leap! In the morning, I was still playing Psycho Fox, and in the evening, I was freaking out for my life with Resident Evil. Bam! Double-generational metaphysical ellipse in the face! I may have barely flown G-Police's bizarre chopper, or even scratched the surface of an MDK demo, but the charm of Abe's Odyssey definitely made me fall in love with the console. Well, I already knew about it, having seen it warmed up by a few friends, but now it was almost mine! I was going to be able to play it for a week every school vacation. And while my father hadn't touched his old SEGA for ages, he had a huge resurgence of interest in this gray Sony machine. We finished Abe's Odyssey together, the old-fashioned way, passing the controller back and forth with each stage passed or life lost. When the sequel, Abe's Exodus, saw the light of day a handful of months later, I didn't even need to claim it as a birthday present; my father had already bought it. In fact, he'd already tested the game without me! Excuse me? What kind of parent dares inflict such a sacrilege on their child?
8 bits plus 10 years = 32
In any case, answering once again to the postulate that anything new is necessarily better than any relic, I loved the second part of the adventure a thousand times more than the first. I played it for about five or six school vacations at least (a necessary exaggeration to improve the intensity of the text). Only a combo pairing the supreme class of Tekken 3 with the virtual amphetamines of R-Type Delta will succeed in making me look away from this priceless gem. And even then, not for that long.
Back in Grace
At a time when the platform game was losing ground on just about every machine, Abe has given its letters of nobility back with two captivating titles, featuring renewed gameplay and some pretty crazy level design. To put it in less pretentious terms, I'd pretty much given up on the genre for a while, since Pitfall on Mega Drive, with a brief stint on Rayman on the computer. Well, I hadn't given up for a long time, actually. But I'd had so much other stuff on PC, involving RTS, management games, FPS and weird FMV stuff, that in my mind, my last experience of a platformer was at least a thousand years ago. And this one seemed so innovative to me, with its lack of lives and continues, the non-existence of messages like “Insert coin”, or “Player 2 press start”... which suited me just fine, since having hardly ever been near an arcade cabinet in my life, I'd been wondering since I was five and a half what kind of weirdo would make us insert a coin into our TV.
I thought we were entering a crazy new era, with renewed gameplay and insane level design. Oh shit, I'm starting to think I'm a food critic again. In any case, even taking Rayman as a comparison, I got really dizzy discovering the number of options available to me. Well, to us. My father played too, even though I sometimes had a hard time handing him the pad because I was so into it and he couldn't put three feet in front of the oth... Come on, let's do it again. Abe's Exodus does a much better job in this respect than its predecessor. You can throw lots of different projectiles, talk to people (well, living beings, at least), take control of lots of different creatures (and even your own explosive farts), not to mention activate mechanisms, camouflage, walk silently...
Our endearing avatar progresses through a flurry of twisting levels, sometimes on two or three planes in the same screen, running, jumping, rolling, traveling through tubes or teleporters, avoiding mines, meat saws and the motley fauna that devote their boundless hatred to him. He does everything the way he did in Oddysee, only better, with the ultimate goal of enabling as many of Abe's fellow Mudokons as possible to escape. After all, these kindly, naive bipeds are enslaved and exploited to the bone (literally) by horrible, crooked industrialists. Who don't even have arms. Enough to make the eyes of an Islamo-ecologist-bobo-leftist apprentice like me shine. And to deepen the rescue mechanics, Mudokons sometimes suffer from various afflictions that need to be taken into account before they can be put in a safe place.
You have to look after those who've drunk too much beer made from... well, let's just say that drinking it has turned them into cannibals. Blind individuals (whose bosses have sewn their eyes shut to keep them in line) must be guided, otherwise they'll throw themselves into the first ravine that comes along... The chore of freeing three hundred Mudokons, instead of ninety-nine in the first opus, becomes all the more delicious.
Atmospheric Pressure
I find that this Exoddus is one of those games that manages to keep intact what made the magic of its predecessor, while transcending just about every aspect, from the graphics to the content, the general atmosphere, the number of cinematics and the age of the captain. Even today, I still agree with my thirteen- or fourteen-year-old self. Even in retrospect, I'd say this sequel does everything better than its ancestor. OK, except for some sound effects or voices that are a little less inspired, but you really have to dig. So, whereas Oddysee takes us roughly into the big main zone of Rupture Farms, then into the wilds of Paramonia and Scrabania, the second epic reveals no less than seven regions! Now, I'm not sure if this doubles the lifespan and exploration time, but maybe it does. We explore an oppressive jungle, populated by animals already familiar from the first game, as well as new ones.
We learn that Rupture Farms, the disgusting slaughterhouse we blew up in Oddysee, is part of a huge industrial complex, including a Slig barracks (hand-headed morons who machine-gun every last speck of dust), a morbid brewery (which crushes the bones of nice Mudokons to make beer, you know see where cannibalism comes from), among other buildings connected to a network of railroad tracks leading from a rather creepy station. And let's not forget the mystical vaults and noxious mines. Yeah, we're swimming in permanent good humor. The static scenery perfectly illustrates the darkness and desolation intended by the developers. Even when inspected by today's merciless eyes, accustomed to ultra HD and all that, their timeless beauty is breathtaking.
The artists have drawn on the best of steampunk and post-apocalyptic art, as well as the creations of our beloved Mother Nature, to create an unforgettable universe. Huge rusting pipelines rub shoulders with thousand-year-old tree roots, long production lines give way to temples lost in sacred mountains. And yet, as much as we shudder with fear and pleasure, we also laugh. The beasts' faces, their silly voices and laughter, the messages scattered throughout the game via screens or billboards... it often does the job. Although, the more I replay these supposedly amusing moments, the more I get the painful impression that nostalgia is laughing instead of me. In any case, it did the job in the '90s. That increasingly uncomfortable sentence, seriously.
Listening to our needs
If we drew the soundtrack, it would look exactly like the scenery. Even more so! It would show everything that's happening live, because it has an intelligence of its own. Well, almost. Depending on the player's actions (at random, running away from rabid pseudo-dogs or triggering the general alarm by detonating a grenade), a more or less anxiety-inducing section accompanies the scene. We dodge the bullets of ugly soldiers firing at us to the rhythm of big, heavy percussion, and enjoy a mesmerizing lullaby when we stop to breathe behind a large pebble engraved with magic runes. At times, we flirt with the limits of experimental scholarly music, without ever tipping over into the exclusive side that would lose everyone along the way. So these compositions are both highly specialized and highly accessible? Exactly! Good answer from the sickly little Mudokon in the background, yes the one falling into the giant mincer. Ellen Meijers delivers remarkable work on every level (she won an award for Abe's Oddysee and was a finalist for Exoddus), juggling industrial, natural, materialistic and spiritual sounds. It's a shame I never heard about her again. I could have bought one of the games she worked on, but then again, I'd have had to know a single one from the list.
Succession guaranteed
While I loved exploring the game for the first time with my dad, then a second time on my own, and a third (daddy was back playing Free Cell and Taipei on his 486 DX2 66 lmao), I even more enjoyed introducing it to my little brothers ten years later. The console had gathered a bit of dust, but not that much - we'd stored it well. But Abe's Exoddus hadn't aged a day! Seeing the two kids utter admiring “Woooows” every minute made me swallow fifty digital Proust Madeleines in one go. I saw myself again at about the same age, fascinated by my own videogame adventures, alone or with my big sister Elena Vestibule. No matter how hard I try to recapture that nostalgic magic by writing about it, while listening to my vintage gaming playlist to boot, it's no use! I can only hope that someone will discover how to turn back time, as long as I'm still alive.
That said, this game would also have made me extremely angry. Sometimes because of some really complicated phases, sometimes for a much more stupid reason. There was a Quicksave mode in the menu, which allowed you to save your progress and return to it at will, without using the memory card. It was a real time-saver, especially for a lump like me who had to save after every obstacle. One day, after a good three hours using the Quicksave, the game crashed. I couldn't restart it without switching off the console. When I turned it back on, there was no trace of my game, since I'd never sent it to the memory card. The feeling of having been robbed of three hours of your life for nothing in return - there's no greater frustration, I think.