Oddworld: Soulstorm
Dweveloper/publisher Oddworld Inhabitants Format PC, PS4, PS5 (tested) Release Out now
PC, PS4, PS5
The sound of hard rocks slapping against bloody, wet meat. The vicious barks of ancient, feral creatures rending flesh from bone. The pneumatic march of machine legs patrolling dank prisons and factory floors slick with grease. These are the sounds you may remember of Oddworld – an oppressive state where capitalism seems to have almost reached its logical, doomed conclusion. A world where the proletariat is worked to death, ground up into food and then served the ruling class. Where the slaves quite literally feed the system.
Or they would if it weren’t for Abe, who overheard the baddies’ plot to turn the proles into profiteroles back in Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee in 1997 and its shot-for-shot remake Oddworld: New ’N’ Tasty in 2014. Eager not to be turned into a canaille cannoli, the Mudokon emancipator flees RuptureFarms and – canonically – takes his fellow workers with him, eager to serve perennial big bad Molluck the Glukkon his just desserts. Enter Oddworld: Soulstorm, a loose retread of 1998’s Oddworld: Abe’s Exoddus. The world is as unwelcoming as you remember it: fascistic Sligs roam the roads, itchy trigger fingers primed to shoot Abe on sight. The native fauna sleeps restlessly, hackles raised and teeth bared at the first sign of any interloper. But it’s not just the world that’s unwelcoming – the game itself has somehow taken on this hostility and often feels like it simply doesn’t want to be played. It’s not merely trying to be hard – at times, it’s intentionally obtuse.
Back in the ’90s, when the cinematic platformer was more or less glued to a tile-based template, you knew what to expect. Every death, every leap of faith that fell short, every bullet to the gut, every mine exploding underfoot felt fair and predictable. Inevitable, almost, in Abe’s ill-thought-out quest for freedom. Yet, in Soulstorm, with its preposterously dubbed ‘2.9D’ perspective, these old rules no longer apply. Being shelled from on high by boot-kissing Sligs determined to recapture their AWOL workforce isn’t particularly fun when mortar fire can collide with you through walls apparently meant to protect you. Guiding Mudokons through rusty, rickety machinery is less engaging when they clip through the scenery and end up mashed within the bowels of grinding gears with no forewarning. Having to restart from checkpoints when patrol paths get bugged tests the patience still further. The consistent, conspicuous bugs are unbecoming of Oddworld, a place where taut design and atmosphere are normally at home. Perhaps they’re still there beneath it all, but it’s hard to appreciate the character and ambience of the place when you need to reset for the fifth time in an hour.
Still, since his escape, Abe has learned that he needs to adapt to survive. Pilfering loot from lockers, rummaging through bins, and hurriedly gaffer-taping items together to craft rudimentary bombs are now all part of staying alive in the wildlands between
RuptureFarms and your new goal, the Soulstorm Brewery. (It turns out the drink is designed to be the opiate of the masses – an addictive sedative solution to keeping the Mudokon workforce subservient and pliable.) Tossing items to distract guards or breaking crates to gather new materials is all well and good when it works, but floaty physics, inconsistent animations, sustained glitches and awkward controls deter you from getting your teeth into these mechanics in the intended way. Instead, we tend to simply barrel through fires, ducking and rolling and hoping for the best. Besides, immediate death is less frustrating than chucking 16 bottles of water at a fire only for it to remain partially lit and kill you anyway.
It’s hard to appreciate the character and ambience of the place when you need to reset for the fifth time in an hour
As a Mudokon, you’re the underclass; a threat to the status quo. As such, wilfully pinching things from those who tread on your back is a bit of naughty fun in an otherwise miserable existence – a little nibble on the hand that feeds before you get to take a full bite. But the mechanical implementation of these ideas rarely lives up to that promise. It’s a real shame, because if you’re keen to fight back with more non-violent action (or non-lethal, at least), pillaging items, throwing rocks and binding Sligs is pretty much your only choice. But you’d better hope the prompt to incapacitate a Slig appears in time, otherwise you’ll find yourself gunned down yet again.
It’s a pity so much of Oddworld’s oddly geometric landscape is undermined by its odd physics because on the occasions Soulstorm is firing on all cylinders, it’s a joy, a robust throwback to ’90s platforming that takes great pleasure in your failures. When it’s being logically sadistic, there’s real delight in witnessing all those moving parts clicking into place, allowing you to slink by unnoticed if you time and plan everything well. But it often feels wantonly cruel, adding too much chaos to the formula. Layering unpredictable elements on top of precise platforming always seemed likely to gum up the gears like so many dismembered Mudokons, and so it proves.
As a reluctant hero, grudgingly guiding the hoi polloi out of servitude, those frustrations are at least thematically apposite, even if it probably wasn’t the developer’s intention to make your rescue mission quite such a slog. Yet that’s the overriding feeling you’re left with after wrestling with making the clumsy Mudokon do what you want, and agitatedly yelling at the others as they tumble like lemmings into a chasm. Sure, this may be the Oddworld you remember, but this time the underlying horror and grim tension comes not from its world-building or the suffocating threat of capitalism, but from Abe’s half-baked programming, making the poor bug-eyed hero feel suicidal in your hands as he ends up dead again and again. While that means Soulstorm works – accidentally or otherwise – as a metaphor for the struggle of the working classes, all that toil rarely makes for a particularly engaging game.