ODDWORLD: SOULSTORM

A classic returns on PS5

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By now, you should be familiar with the story of freedom fighter Abe, his fellow Mudokons, and the carnivorous corporation they are all enslaved by. Abe’s Oddysee introduced us to their plight on the original PlayStation all the way back in 1997 but we didn’t get the full story.

Abe’s Exoddus debuted a year later. While well-loved in its own right, this second game was not how the developer had envisioned the Oddworld series continuing, and ultimately was rushed into production due to pressure from the series’ publisher at the time. The developer remade the first game in 2014 as Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty! and is now hoping to realise the quintology’s true part two in 2021.

NEW PERSPECTIVES

Soulstorm is a followup that, while reimagining the story, stays true to the series’ beginnings. Director and series co-creator Lorne Lanning tells us, “The reason we went back to [a side-scrolling, 2.5D platformer], was the audience was telling us that’s what they wanted.”

While the perspective will feel familiar to series fans, there’s far more depth to every screen than in conventional 2.5D games, and the developer refers to this as closer to a “2.9D” angle. Industry veteran Bennie Terry III has been part of the Soulstorm team for more than half a decade as executive producer and he tells us that the extra “0.4D” required large parts of the project’s core code base to be rewritten. He says, “Going that far, and getting that dimension was hard.”