The Floor Waxer
Who Saved the World:
Abe's Oddysee at Twenty-Eight

A puzzle-platformer conceived in rage at corporate capitalism, Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee is funnier, stranger, and more politically precise than almost anything made since. It also remains genuinely, stubbornly wonderful to play.

The premise takes about thirty seconds to grasp and a lifetime to shake. You are Abe. You wax floors at RuptureFarms, the planet Oddworld's largest meat-processing facility. You are a Mudokon — stitched-mouthed, wide-eyed, constitutionally unsuited to heroism. One night, while mopping a corridor you shouldn't be in, you overhear a boardroom presentation. The meat industry has run out of animals to slaughter. The new product line is you.

What follows is one of the most politically charged games ever made, and one of the few that earned the description honestly. Lorne Lanning — the game's creator, a classically trained fine-art painter who retrained in character animation at CalArts before spending years in Hollywood visual effects — conceived Oddworld's world from two very specific real-world sources. The Mudokon enslavement, he explained, was drawn directly from De Beers' destruction of South African mining communities: entire cultures dismantled so completely that generations later the workers had no recollection of what had been taken from them. The factory conditions came from the fast food industry's relationship with its labour force. This was not allegory dressed up as entertainment. It was diagnosis.

"Abe wasn't the muscle-bound superhero that you wanted to be — he was the rather pathetic chump that you actually are, at the bottom of the global corporate food chain." — Lorne Lanning

The genius of the game is that Lanning understood what this required mechanically. Abe cannot fight. He has no weapon, no combat upgrade, no upgrade path of any kind. What he has is GameSpeak — a vocabulary of calls, chants, whistles and farts that allows him to communicate with fellow Mudokons, coax them out of stupefied compliance, and guide them to safety. Rescuing slaves is not a side objective. It is the entire point. The game does not let you forget this: your ending — and there are two — is determined entirely by how many you saved. The boardroom logic that wrote Abe off as raw material is the same logic the player must dismantle, one terrified worker at a time.

The development almost didn't happen at all. An executive at publisher GT Interactive, reportedly unconvinced by the game's unconventional direction, attempted to shut production down entirely — taking footage to his superiors in an effort to kill it. His boss saw the footage, loved it, and funded the project further at the executive's expense. It is perhaps the most on-brand story in gaming history: a corporate middleman trying to suppress something strange and true, overruled from above.

Does it hold up? Mostly, and with one honest caveat. The puzzle design is taut and inventive, the level architecture rewards patience without punishing curiosity, and the tonal balance — bleak satire cut through with genuine slapstick — never tips into either cynicism or sentimentality. Abe's death animations alone constitute a minor art form. The humour is so embedded in the mechanics that you feel it rather than observe it; the flatulence that can stun enemies began as a way to make players feel connected to Abe's absurdity, and it still works. What is remarkable is how little the political charge has faded. If anything, RuptureFarms feels more familiar now than it did in 1997.

The caveat is the checkpoint system, and Lanning himself has never flinched from it. He called it a "cluster****" — a coding failure that forced players to replay swathes of punishing level design on death, which was often and sometimes cheap. It hurt the game on release and it will still test your patience today. Play the 2014 remake New 'n' Tasty if you want a more forgiving entry point; play the original if you want the full, unsparing experience Lanning intended, flaws and all.

Perhaps the most telling measure of what Abe's Oddysee actually did to people is a story Lanning tells about the fan mail. A 72-year-old man wrote a handwritten letter, across multiple pages, saying the game had saved his life. The entire studio read it and wept. They named a character after him — Alf Gamble — in the sequel. Lanning has said it was why he wanted to make games in the first place: not the sales figures, not the awards, but the possibility that something made with conviction might find the person who needed it most. For a game about the least powerful creature on the planet discovering he has no choice but to act, that seems exactly right.