The future’s Odd: how Just Add Water revived Oddworld, and where it’ll go next
Stewart Gilray and his team discuss Stranger’s Wrath 2, Fangus Klott and the Hand of Odd.
“One must still have chaos in oneself in order to give birth to a dancing star,” the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote. To risk the contempt of both Mudukon fans and Nietzsche scholars, it’s a formula that seems to describe Oddworld’s mingled bleakness and good humour rather neatly. Peel away the disgusting flaps of mass-produced meat, part the obscene alien tangles of undergrowth, and you’re left with an intoxicating combination of hope and despair – a work of staggering ambition beset by savage doubts about the social, ethical and ecological sustainability of such drives. Oh, and damn good action and puzzling mechanics.
