Description
If Abe’s Oddysee was the game that made you love Abe, Abe’s Exoddus is the game that made you actually enjoy playing as him. I say that with affection. The original Oddysee is one of the most inventive cinematic platformers ever made — the world, the satire, the gamespeak mechanic — but its checkpoint system was genuinely brutal. You could spend twenty minutes inching through a section, die on the last screen, and be sent back to the beginning of the whole sequence. It was the kind of difficulty that tested your love for the game regularly.
Exoddus fixes that. One quick save feature and suddenly the entire experience breathes differently. It sounds like a small thing. It is not.
Developed in nine months — which is remarkable given the quality of what came out — and published by GT Interactive in 1998, Abe’s Exoddus continues directly from Oddysee’s ending. Abe receives a vision from his Mudokon ancestors telling him to liberate the bones of his people from the Necrum Mines, where the Glukkons are using them to brew a happiness-inducing drink called SoulStorm Brew. It is, as always, a darkly funny premise about exploitation and corporate greed — and Oddworld Inhabitants commit to it completely.
Year: 1998
Developer: Oddworld Inhabitants
Atmosphere: Dark Comedy · Industrial · Satirical
Visual Style: Pre-rendered 2D · Cinematic Cutscenes
Focus / Pace: Puzzle Platforming · Methodical
Platforms: PlayStation · Windows
Exoddus vs Oddysee — What Changed?
Everything that frustrated people about Oddysee has been addressed, and everything they loved has been expanded. The quick save is the headline change — the ability to save at any point transforms the trial-and-error design from punishing to pleasurable, because dying no longer costs you ten minutes of progress. You can experiment freely, which is exactly the right relationship to have with a game built around environmental puzzle solving.
Beyond that, Exoddus is simply bigger and more varied. More environments, more enemy types, more Mudokons to rescue — the game is roughly twice the size of Oddysee and maintains its quality throughout. Abe can now possess a wider range of creatures. He can call multiple Mudokons simultaneously. The cutscenes are longer, funnier, and more elaborate. The whole thing feels like Oddworld Inhabitants finishing the game they wanted to make the first time, with the constraints of a debut project removed.
The one honest criticism is that the nine-month development schedule shows in places — a few puzzle sequences feel less elegantly designed than the best of Oddysee, and the difficulty spikes occasionally feel arbitrary rather than intentional. But these are minor complaints against a game that delivers more of one of the best worlds in the genre.
🎮 My opinion
Abe’s Exoddus is the better game of the two. I know that is a slightly controversial opinion — Oddysee has the purity of an original vision, and there is something irreplaceable about encountering Abe’s world for the first time. But Exoddus is more generous, more varied, and more consistently enjoyable to actually play. The quick save alone changes everything.
If you bounced off Oddysee because of the difficulty, come back through Exoddus. It is the same world, the same humour, the same dark satirical heart — just without the checkpoint brutality that made the first one so exhausting in its harder moments.
Where can I play Abe’s Exoddus?
Abe’s Exoddus is available on PC via Steam and GOG. The original PlayStation version is playable via emulation. A spiritual reimagining — Oddworld: Soulstorm — was released in 2021 and serves as a loose remake of Exoddus with a significantly darker tone.
Games similar to Abe’s Exoddus
Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee (1997)
Play the original first — not because it is a prerequisite, but because Exoddus is best understood as a response to it. The world, the characters, and the satirical framework all originate there, and the improvements in Exoddus hit harder when you know what they were fixing.
Flashback (1992)
Flashback shares Exoddus’s combination of cinematic platforming, sci-fi atmosphere, and a protagonist navigating a world built to exploit the powerless. Different tone — less funny, more noir — but the structural kinship is real.
If you are drawn to games that combine stealth-driven traversal, darkly satirical world-building, and the specific pleasure of outsmarting a world that is overwhelmingly stacked against you, titles like Blackthorne, Another World, and Oddworld: Soulstorm offer wonderful alternatives that sit right alongside Abe’s Oddysee in the genre’s essential catalogue.