Another World – 20th Anniversary Edition

Quite an interesting game with a few neat elements that make it fascinating to play in the modern day. While many people will probably be familiar with the Amiga original, and this is a faithful recreation of that game, there are portions which will delight old fans and intrigue the new. An adventure-action game to a lesser degree, only without much esoteric puzzle solving, the game features a young man being transported to an alien planet (intro movie) where he must work to escape the strange world. Death is fairly easy to come by, and each scene has a small mechanic that has to be overcome to proceed. I enjoyed the gameplay design that saw your character reset to the part of the scene in which they had to 'do something' in order to proceed, after a death. This means that while you think you've made progress sometimes, when you die, you return to a much earlier point and go, "Ah, I thought I'd finished this puzzle, but clearly I missed something." There are deceptive moments where you believe you’ve made progress but you’ve actually missed a crucial piece. The game isn’t long, by any stretch of the imagination, but it is comfortably challenging. It causes you to really think about your actions and to work on your timing. I enjoyed it more than a lot of games from the era. Being able to switch back and forth between the ‘refreshed’ graphics and the old graphics is nice. I played most of the game on the new graphics but would toggle back frequently to see what it might have been like on original hardware. I also appreciate that they kept the extra scene in from later versions of the game, which wasn’t present in the original Amiga release. I dare say there will be original fans who are surprised in the moment, that there’s a whole chunk of the game that they’re not familiar with. Enjoy it if this is you. Glad I picked this up on a whim, when it was cheap.