[This post is part of a collaborative Sonic retrospective based around the games on Sonic Mega Collection Plus. To read more, please head over to the central post!]
The Ooze is one of the odder inclusions on Sonic Mega Collection Plus. A top-down slime-’em-up in which you play the victim of a horrible scientific experiment, it is not, in fact, a Sonic game. Nor does it even have the positive reputation of Comix Zone. On a similar basis, it is superficially present because it was made by the American branch of Sega Technical Institute, who previously made Sonic Spinball and, together with its Japanese half, Sonic 2. On a bit of exploration though, The Ooze has its own extra strong links to the original Sonic, which it is a bit of a twisted mirror version of.
First, take the aesthetics. Games being grotty is a long-established tradition, from Barbarian to Mortal Kombat and beyond. Grotty usually tends to go hand-in-hand with gory, though. The Ooze, with its full-screen pulsing neon goo titles, its unpleasant sticky things, its burping, its general oozing, finds a different route. This is a more family-friendly grotty, such as it is. And that feels like an exaggerated version of the attitude that Sonic the character was given as a way of standing out.
Second, the mechanics. In The Ooze, you control a sentient puddle of goo. Well, you control the head of a sentient puddle of goo. The rest of the puddle just sort of oozes around you, but also is you. You can extend bits of it to hit enemies, or indeed spit bits at them. It’s not that easy to get your head around, gooey or otherwise. The upshot of it is, though, that enemies can chop away at the puddle and reduce it in size, but you can gain power and health back again by finding or creating more little puddles of goo. This is recognisably an extension of Sonic’s use of rings as dual purpose collectible/health-meter, just much more powerfully visual.
Finally, there’s the theme. On this I turn to a passage from Martin F’s description of the original Sonic the Hedgehog: “Here in the Scrap Brain Zone, we reach the apex of technological progress, a fully automated factory designed from the top down to murder you. Sonic the Hedgehog presents a profoundly negative opinion of technology, which is fascinating given its status as the flagship title of Sega, a company whose marketing was so focused on touting their technological superiority to their rivals that they infamously advertised their consoles with impressive and advanced-sounding features that were, in fact, completely meaningless buzzwords.”
The sense that Sonic has of being fundamentally at war with itself and the potential of technology is brought even more to the fore in The Ooze. You are the disgusting, toxic product of technology, roaming the burnt-out wasteland that technology has wrought, and using that technology to fight back and take revenge, the system turned in on itself in belching, poisonous fury. Celebration and condemnation both get ramped up until they collapse into a puddle.
There are some design decisions which keep The Ooze from actually being as good an experience in practice as all of that suggests. Narrow spaces, fiddly switches and poorly signposted backtracking to figure out where to go next all get in the way of the thrill of being a force of horrible destruction. It feels like it lacks sufficient confidence in its own premises. Still, as a product of some of Sonic’s philosophies taken to their illogical conclusion, it’s a fascinating way to cap off a collection of those games.