Beat Another World - 20th Anniversary Edition on the first day of this year and somehow didn't get around to post anything about that here. Specifically I beat it on PlayStation Vita because I dug that one up recently and this seemed like a good game to beat on that little console.
This marks my first playthrough of Another World ever, even though I first played it on an Amiga 500 when I was like four years old (which was a tad traumatizing, to be honest). I've approached it again and again over the years but always got stuck or rage quit sooner or later.
Anyway, it's a game that has aged both remarkably well and utterly terribly. And frankly I don't think I've ever fully appreciated the good until now.
I've always wondered where that "cinematic" in "cinematic platformer" really came from. Most of these games are basically just platformers with more realistic character behaviour, some adventure elements and some amount of narrative. Not much that's particularly "cinematic" about them.
Well, now I get it. Another World is truly like a very early attempt at fusing movies with video games. And I mean truly fusing them. It's not just a game that's filled with cutscenes, nor is it a movie with a bit of interactivity thrown in. It really feels like Eric Chahi had a developed a movie script, with lots of specific events and shots, and genuinely executed that one as a computer game rather than a film.
Sure, you control a dude much like in a platform game... most of the time. But really the game feels completely unrestricted by any game mechanics. It really feels like whatever Chahi wanted to happen in the game, he would find a way to actually do that - and he'd do it in the most appropriate way and not take any shortcuts. There's lots of custom animations for scripted events, there's various game mechanics like rolling around a vent or shooting a laser gun that can also create shields, there's close-up shots, there's even real cutscenes.
And the amount of detail in all of that is utterly ridiculous. Like, when you start freeing yourself from a suspended cage by swinging it around, the guard goes through several stages where he first notices what you're doing, starts yelling at you angrily, eventually he starts firing warning shots until the cage falls directly onto him. That whole sequence is honestly pretty impressive even by modern standards. And you will find this love for little details throughout the entire game from start to finish. There's just so much little custom content in the form of animations and sounds that's just there to make the game subtly more impactful. By the end I had serious Kojima vibes.
And most of the time it also plays surprisingly well, which is insane for such an ambitious game developed so early. Alas... only most of the time. The first half of the game or so is mostly smooth sailing. You have some okay platforming, fun shootouts and very simple but decent environmental puzzles. But then the game world suddenly opens up and it all goes to hell.
In the second half of the game you can move quite freely around a large area consisting of like over a dozen of screens. The problem is that there's a very specific order you have to actually do them in and you can never tell for sure if you're failing to make progress because of skill issues or because you're in the wrong place in the first place. And to make matters worse, you can easily soft lock yourself here. If you do things out of order or fail to execute a certain action correctly, you're unable to beat the game anymore.
Luckily dying (which is very easy to do here) will restore a valid game state. Even better: the checkpoint system will actually only unlock new checkpoints when you've made actual progress - and while you're making progress, you get another checkpoint every 2-3 screens, which is very generous. It effectively keeps the game from becoming super frustrating during its finnicky shootouts and platforming challenges where you will probably die a lot. I think on some screens I died like a dozen times in a row, and it was no big deal since I could constantly retry and only had to succeed once.
But still: I'm not sure I would have ever had the necessary patience to beat the game without resorting to a walkthrough a couple of times during that convoluted sequence in the game's second half.
That said: I'm mighty impressed by the game and super glad that I finally beat it (almost 35 years after I first played it!). I don't think that I ever expected its emotional layer to remain almost entirely intact. You still really feel stuff in this game, like the hero's pain when he's hurt or dies, or camaraderie with your fellow inmate with whom you're trying to escape from alien prison. Or panic when a monster that's chasing you is gradually catching up and utter relief when said monster stumbles at just the last moment before it gets you. That and lots of other stuff that I don't want to spoil There's really some magic in this game that few games have managed to capture since.
Post edited January 19, 2026 by F4LL0UT