Last Update: 4/5/07
Another World
Another World, known as Out of this World in the US and Outer World in Japan, is a 1991 cinematic platformer designed and developed by Eric Chahi. The graphics and box art were designed by Chahi, while the music was composed by Jean-François Freitas.
While not a great commercial success, Another World was innovative in its use of cinematic effects in the graphics, sound and cut scenes, with characters communicating through their facial features, gestures, and actions only. This cinematic style granted Another World cult status amongst critics and fans.
The protagonist of the game is Lester Knight Chaykin; a young, athletic, red haired physicist. Lester arrives at his high-tech underground laboratory during a thunderstorm, and continues to work on his experiment using a particle accelerator. Right before the particles reach their intended destination, lightning strikes the lab and interferes with the accelerator causing the unforeseen teleportation of Lester to a barren alien planet.
The player can control Lester using the keyboard or gamepad using four directions buttons and two action buttons: one for main actions, and one for jumping. Depending on the player's current position, movement, and status, the main action key performs a variety of actions including attacking and interacting with Lester's environment. At the start of the game Lester can only kick to attack, but later he can acquire a gun. While the movement keys normally make Lester run, the game also features sections where the player must swim, roll, or drive a vehicle. The player only has one life, but there are multiple checkpoints he can return to by entering the relevant pass code given at each one.
While not a great commercial success, Another World was innovative in its use of cinematic effects in the graphics, sound and cut scenes, with characters communicating through their facial features, gestures, and actions only. This cinematic style granted Another World cult status amongst critics and fans.
The protagonist of the game is Lester Knight Chaykin; a young, athletic, red haired physicist. Lester arrives at his high-tech underground laboratory during a thunderstorm, and continues to work on his experiment using a particle accelerator. Right before the particles reach their intended destination, lightning strikes the lab and interferes with the accelerator causing the unforeseen teleportation of Lester to a barren alien planet.
The player can control Lester using the keyboard or gamepad using four directions buttons and two action buttons: one for main actions, and one for jumping. Depending on the player's current position, movement, and status, the main action key performs a variety of actions including attacking and interacting with Lester's environment. At the start of the game Lester can only kick to attack, but later he can acquire a gun. While the movement keys normally make Lester run, the game also features sections where the player must swim, roll, or drive a vehicle. The player only has one life, but there are multiple checkpoints he can return to by entering the relevant pass code given at each one.
Publisher: U.S. Gold
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Bottom Line: Play it! Another World took brave steps into unknown territory when it first came out back in 1991. It was visually adventurous and tried things with gameplay that few games nowadays try to emulate. It's graphics style is quite unique, employing an interesting vector-based style that give the game a distinct look. The wisdom of basing the graphics on this alternative design proved its merits when the game was to be re-released for its 10th Anniversary recently; the game was easily upscaled to modern resolutions, allowing it to look as impressive as ever.
The game centers around a young professor named Lester, whose science experiment goes awry and sends him to an alien world. There isn't any distinction between the opening sequence and the start of the actual game, and you are immediately immersed as you take over control of Lester and traverse the other-wordly surroundings. The game appears to play as a platformer, and most descriptions of the game usually include the words adventure and action; however I personally think of it as a puzzle game. Each screen has some puzzle aspect to it, and more often than not actions to progress in the game are unique, ie. there's only one part of the game where you jump off a ledge and grab a vine to escape a monster. This makes for varied gameplay and fresh puzzles. What is especially endearing is that the game always plays like a cinematic, there are no giveaway HUD items on the screen and all the time that you are playing it feels like your playing out the story. Having said all that, the game isn't as great as most people like to remember, at least as far as actual gameplay is concerned. The controls are atrocious; the response time as well as the movement capabilities of Lester are quite bad, and makes the game extremely frustrating. Most of the time the apparent difficulty is due not to solving a problem, but executing it. The game makes uses of passworded checkpoints, so it eases a little of the pain of replaying sections, which you will be doing very, very often. Maneuvering Lester is quite cumbersome as it becomes hard to judge jump distances, and even defeating enemies can prove challenging because the gun and the shield are effected by the same button. While the game's simplicity is its strength in general, it doesn't help the controls which should be tight and responsive, something the game's spiritual successor, Flashback managed to pull off perfectly. Ultimately, once completing a particular checkpoint, the feeling of relief and triumph quickly washes away all the preceding frustration, especially if you are rewarded with a cut sequence; so it is hard to be mad at the game for long. If it weren't for some points that were ridiculously hard beyond belief, this game would deserve full marks. The bottom line is that the game must be tried, if only to see the beautiful integration of presentation and interaction. The 10th Anniversary edition has been out for a while and is highly recommended. Learning Curve: Takes a while
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