{"id":120116,"date":"2020-10-31T18:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-10-31T18:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/reviews\/nintendo-switch\/oddworld_new_n_tasty"},"modified":"2020-10-31T18:00:00","modified_gmt":"2020-10-31T18:00:00","slug":"review-oddworld-new-n-tasty-a-so-so-remake-of-a-legendary-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2020\/10\/31\/review-oddworld-new-n-tasty-a-so-so-remake-of-a-legendary-game\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Oddworld: New &#8216;n&#8217; Tasty &#8211; A So-So Remake Of A Legendary Game"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"media_block\"><a href=\"https:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/8ab4a1a458299\/large.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/8ab4a1a458299\/small.jpg\" class=\"media_thumbnail\"><\/a><\/div>\n<div id>\n<aside class=\"picture embed\"><a title=\"Oddworld: New 'n' Tasty Review - Screenshot 1 of 3\" href=\"https:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/109875\/large.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/109875\/900x.jpg\" width=\"900\" height=\"506\" alt=\"Oddworld: New 'n' Tasty Review - Screenshot 1 of 3\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld\/Undocked)<\/p>\n<\/aside>\n<p>What a difficult game to review. Yes, yes, you&#8217;re thinking. It must be <em>so hard<\/em> for you to review a well-received remake of a beloved classic. But, you see, it <em>is<\/em>, because <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/games\/nintendo-switch\/oddworld_new_n_tasty\">Oddworld: New &#8216;n&#8217; Tasty<\/a><\/strong> does so much wrong and is in many ways so utterly redundant that it&#8217;s difficult to keep a cool head when approaching it.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s the thing; there was no reason to remake the original 1997 <strong>Oddworld: Abe&#8217;s Oddysee<\/strong>. At the time New &#8216;n&#8217; Tasty originally launched (the halcyon days of 2014), its source material was widely available on PlayStation 3 and Steam. And it still is. But, no, folks wanted their Abe action to get some sort of spit-shine, so in comes New &#8216;n&#8217; Tasty &#8220;fixing&#8221; everything that wasn&#8217;t broken and stripping the game of a good deal of its precision, atmosphere and general appeal.<\/p>\n<p>Is it bad, then? Should we cut to the chase and just give it a low score? <em>No, no, no.<\/em> New &#8216;n&#8217; Tasty doesn&#8217;t deserve that. It&#8217;s fun to play and the basic components that make Abe&#8217;s Oddysee so good are here. Some of the quality of life improvements are smart ones, most crucially the implementation of <strong>Abe&#8217;s Exoddus&#8217;<\/strong> valuable &#8220;All o&#8217; ya&#8221; command, which allows you to engage multiple Mudokons in Gamespeak at once, meaning no more painstakingly ferrying them back and forth one at a time.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"picture embed\"><a title=\"Oddworld: New 'n' Tasty Review - Screenshot 2 of 3\" href=\"https:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/109874\/large.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"lazy\" src=\"\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg' viewBox='0 0 900 506'%3E%3C\/svg%3E\" width=\"900\" height=\"506\" data-original=\"https:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/109874\/900x.jpg\" alt=\"Oddworld: New 'n' Tasty Review - Screenshot 2 of 3\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld\/Undocked)<\/p>\n<\/aside>\n<p><em>Gamespeak?<\/em> What&#8217;s that? Whoops, we got ahead of ourselves. I suppose we ought to explain what Abe&#8217;s Oddysee is, or <em>was<\/em>, but quite frankly you should already know and shame on you if you don&#8217;t. A cinematic platformer akin to the original <strong>Prince of Persia<\/strong>, the game took place in a flip-screen world with pre-rendered background environments, focusing on timing-critical action, tense stealth and light puzzle-solving. The widely-touted Gamespeak feature saw Abe able to command his fellow slave workers around using basic commands such as &#8220;Hello&#8221;, or &#8220;Follow me&#8221;. Simplistic, yes, but also fresh, exciting and organic. While the single-screen compositions were dated even in &#8217;97, they served the action brilliantly, making each new area stick in the mind. It helped that it was (and still is) gorgeous.<\/p>\n<p>And New &#8216;n&#8217; Tasty is gorgeous, too. It looks fantastic in places, and the fidelity is enormously impressive even in handheld mode. Unfortunately, the same can&#8217;t be said for many other aspects of the game when compared to Oddysee. Adding full scrolling gameplay to the experience seems like a no-brainer, but without adapting the level design it leads to a game that feels markedly less carefully designed.<\/p>\n<p>In the original, you&#8217;d encounter sleeping enemies you&#8217;d need to sneak past. The transition between screens was just that \u2013 <em>a transition<\/em>, and it would give you pause. You&#8217;d think, <em>hang on<\/em>, I have no idea what&#8217;s coming next, and you&#8217;d sneak onto the screen just in case there was a Slig in the land of nod. Here, you never know what&#8217;s coming up, so you could find yourself just running headlong into a situation that you&#8217;re not prepared for in the slightest. The screen divisions made each space stand alone; it made you, as a player, consider what you were faced with. Here, it&#8217;s all muddied by this simple change. Some of the level designs have been altered to account for this. Others, not so much.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"picture embed\"><a title=\"Oddworld: New 'n' Tasty Review - Screenshot 3 of 3\" href=\"https:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/109873\/large.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"lazy\" src=\"\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg' viewBox='0 0 900 506'%3E%3C\/svg%3E\" width=\"900\" height=\"506\" data-original=\"https:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/109873\/900x.jpg\" alt=\"Oddworld: New 'n' Tasty Review - Screenshot 3 of 3\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld\/Undocked)<\/p>\n<\/aside>\n<p>There&#8217;s also the animation \u2013 Abe seems much lighter and fleeter-of-foot here. The weight and energy of the original is gone. It&#8217;s not nearly as absorbing \u2013 you&#8217;re no longer at the mercy of a hostile world, you&#8217;re simply playing a game. More yammering, pointless dialogue has been added. The change of game feel has rendered some sections ridiculously trivial, others far harder. A quicksave feature has been added, but when you die it loads your last checkpoint rather than your last save. Abe&#8217;s Exoddus got that part right in 1998.<\/p>\n<p>But we could be negative all day long if we focus on the minutiae, if we consistently compare this remake to its inspiration. As a game, New &#8216;n&#8217; Tasty is good. Better than good, in fact. It&#8217;s a lot of fun, still, and if you&#8217;re not familiar with the original Abe&#8217;s Oddysee, it&#8217;s going to impress. The level design is still good, there&#8217;s still atmosphere here (though far less), the controls are slick enough and the multiple difficulty levels a sensible concession \u2013 though only the hardest mode is really worth playing, frankly, as this game was never that difficult in the first place.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s good because Abe&#8217;s Oddysee was good, but that&#8217;s the only reason. And that may seem petty, but really, why remake a game only to strip it of precision and atmosphere like this? What&#8217;s the point, ultimately? A nice port of Oddysee and Exoddus would have been far more desirable, and their &#8220;limitations&#8221; barely register today in a world where even more &#8220;primitive&#8221; indie titles have been wholeheartedly embraced. Abe&#8217;s Oddysee hasn&#8217;t aged, and this is a <em>less<\/em> good version of it. But it&#8217;s a less good version of a great game, and it looks and runs great, so it&#8217;s still plenty of fun. Just&#8230; <em>why?<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div id=\"conclusion\">\n<h2 class=\"heading\">Conclusion<\/h2>\n<p>We realise it&#8217;s not a popular outlook. Games should generally be appreciated for what they are rather than blasted for what they&#8217;re not, but that&#8217;s very difficult to do in this case. New &#8216;n&#8217; Tasty is an acceptable imitation of Abe&#8217;s Oddysee, but nothing more. It has its moments of inspiration \u2013 the Stockyards stage is so beautifully realised that it can momentarily trigger that &#8220;this is what I remember the original looking like!&#8221; false memory \u2013 but it&#8217;s not enough to make up for the frustrations that come from the many, many unnecessary changes. Even the sound of Abe&#8217;s chant, which once sounded mystical and otherworldly, now just sounds like babbling. We&#8217;re very torn. As this is the only way to play Abe&#8217;s Oddysee on Switch, we begrudgingly recommend it. But we do so with our arms folded, and pouting. <em>Harrumph.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld\/Undocked) What a difficult game to review. Yes, yes, you&#8217;re thinking. It must be so hard for you to review a well-received remake of a beloved classic. But, you see, it is, because Oddworld: New &#8216;n&#8217; Tasty does so much wrong and is in many ways so utterly redundant that it&#8217;s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-120116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nintendo-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=120116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120116\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=120116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=120116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=120116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}