Out of this World: 15th Anniversary Edition review

Nostalgia is a dangerous thing. We remember Out of this World’s beautifully animated alien vistas and a cinematic and narrative edge conjured up with nary a syllable of the written or spoken word.

What we don’t remember, however, is the hours we must have spent as a 12-year-old screaming and shouting as the game forced us to replay the same bastard-hard cavern jumping sequences after a cruel one-shot kill from a lumbering monkey-man guard. Games just used to be harder, and we were used to repetition back then. Whoever patented the quicksave must be rich by now…

For the uneducated, the ill-advised and the irrepressibly young, Out of this World was the remarkable platformer that begat Flashback that begat Oddworld that begat, well… lots of things. The reason it’s so fondly remembered though, is the fact that in its day it showed a touch of the Half-Life’s - thinking outside of the traditional gameplay box.

Bear witness, for example, to the scene where Lester is racing through a darkened chamber with red alien laser shots lighting up the room as they fire through a grill from the floor below. Or even the most memorable scene, in which you’re punching at the buttons of an alien craft - accidentally letting missiles and laser blasts rain down on a crowd of thousands - until you’re launched into a naked spa bath usually reserved for naked alien ladies.