#57: Another World (Delphine, Amiga, 1991)

Another World‘s visuals are a singular product of the vision of one Éric Chahi, and are impressive even now. Reading that their simplicity and beautiful desolation inspired Fumito Ueda, of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus fame, doesn’t come as any great surprise. Those visuals wouldn’t serve Another World anything like as well as they do without that intro’s move from the familiar to the unfamiliar, though. The audience is pulled in with the character and lives the unfamiliarity along with them. Without it, the scene as the player takes control and a tiny character emerges from the lake into a stylishly drawn rocky landscape with moon (and another moon) hanging above it would be pretty and intriguing. Relate to his displacement, and its harsh alien beauty is that much sharper. You can’t have an Other without a norm to compare against.

If you do relate to the character, it helps to make a positive of the game’s extreme difficulty, too. As a rough guide for how Another World plays, think of an even more stylised Prince of Persia with the awkwardness of the character’s movement magnified, few hints as to what to do, and the sword fights replaced with instadeath laser gun battles. There are checkpoints that let you keep dying in the same place, one ending after another, in a more modern style, but not a lot of other concessions to the player. Being hard was presumably a practical necessity with a game with a twenty minute playing time on a perfect run-through, but it does more than just drag things out.

Watching a cutscene of dying from a leg-slash wound inflicted by a tiny worm, being reduced to a skeleton by laser blast, or getting sucked into another gaping mouth in the ground, is dramatic. Watching that same cutscene twenty times over is a forceful reminder: the man that you carry on through the game is one living a charmed life in which everything that could go right did go right, and every glimpse at an alternative history is another reinforcement of his fortune. It gets across the grinding hostility of the world in a way that no movie full of narrow escapes ever could. It turns an indifferent twenty minute sci-fi plot with some deft visuals into another experience entirely. At least up until whichever point your particular tolerance for ridiculous difficulty runs out, and it becomes just another pretty but broken game.