Description

I remember the first time I saw the trailer for New ‘n’ Tasty and feeling something I did not quite expect: relief. Not just excitement — actual relief. After years of Oddworld Inhabitants navigating turbulent publisher relationships, cancelled projects, and a long creative silence, here was Abe again, looking better than ever, in a remake built from the ground up by a small studio called Just Add Water that clearly loved the material as much as anyone who had grown up with the original.

It is a genuinely remarkable remake — one of the best I have played in this genre — and the fact that it does not fully replace the original says more about how extraordinary Abe’s Oddysee is than about any failure of New ‘n’ Tasty.

Developed by Just Add Water using the Unity engine, the game rebuilds Abe’s Oddysee completely from scratch — same story, same levels, same structure, but with 3D environments, reworked cutscenes, expanded GameSpeak, a quick save system borrowed from Exoddus, and three times as many Mudokons to rescue. It is emphatically not an HD port. It is a remake that understood what it was remaking.

New ‘n’ Tasty vs Abe’s Oddysee — What Changed?

The most significant change is the one that divides opinion most: the fixed screens are gone. Abe’s Oddysee was built around discrete screens — each one its own self-contained puzzle, loaded independently, resettable by stepping back to the previous screen. New ‘n’ Tasty replaces this with a continuously scrolling camera, and the effect is more significant than it sounds.

The original’s fixed screens gave every puzzle a specific frame and a specific logic — you could see exactly what you were working with, and the edges of the screen were part of the puzzle design. The scrolling camera makes the world feel more connected and the environments more impressive, but it removes a tool that experienced players relied on and changes the rhythm of how puzzles are approached.

Beyond that, the quick save is transformative — the same change that made Exoddus so much more accessible makes New ‘n’ Tasty the most forgiving way to experience the Oddysee story. The expanded Mudokon count — 300 versus the original’s 99 — adds significant replay incentive. And the visuals are simply stunning: RuptureFarms looks like the nightmarish industrial horror it was always meant to be, with a level of environmental detail that the PlayStation hardware of 1997 could only gesture toward.

The one honest criticism is that a few of the puzzle sequences feel slightly less elegantly designed than the original — the scrolling camera created some technical challenges that required puzzle layouts to be adjusted, and not all of those adjustments are improvements. Hardcore fans of Oddysee will feel this. Newcomers almost certainly will not.

The Story

Same as Oddysee — Abe discovers his fellow Mudokons are about to become food, escapes, and sets out to liberate as many of them as possible before confronting the Glukkons. The two endings based on how many Mudokons you rescue are intact, and the good ending remains one of the most satisfying payoffs in the genre. The reworked cutscenes add personality and visual richness without changing the beats of the story, and the expanded GameSpeak gives Abe and his companions more to say to each other in ways that deepen the world without overexplaining it.

Graphics

Extraordinary for a remake of this scope — and a genuine artistic achievement in its own right. The 3D environments rendered with dynamic lighting and moving parts give the world a scale and presence that the original’s pre-rendered backgrounds could not achieve. The creature designs are faithful to the originals but rendered with a richness of texture and animation that makes them feel genuinely alive. The sun lancing through gaps in a temple roof. The cages of wildlife trundling into a grinder. These are not just visual upgrades — they are moments of environmental storytelling that the original could only imply.

Gameplay

The core loop is Oddysee’s — stealth, gamespeak, possession, environmental puzzle solving — with the quality-of-life improvements that Exoddus established and a few new wrinkles. The quick save changes everything for players who bounced off the original’s checkpoint system. The expanded moveset gives Abe slightly more physical vocabulary. The scrolling camera makes some sections feel more dynamic than they did in the original, and a few feel slightly less precisely designed.

Controls are the one consistent criticism — the analog stick handling both walk and run speeds, rather than the original’s dedicated button toggle, makes it slightly too easy to overshoot platforms or stumble into traps in tense situations. It is a minor frustration in an otherwise excellent package.

Where can I play New ‘n’ Tasty?

Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty is available on PC via Steam and GOG, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, PS Vita, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Wii U, iOS, and Android. It is one of the most widely available games in the genre and is frequently on sale at a very modest price.

Games similar to New ‘n’ Tasty

One last thing worth mentioning: if New ‘n’ Tasty leaves you hungry for more, Oddworld: Soulstorm (2021) is the natural next stop — a loose reimagining of Exoddus built by Oddworld Inhabitants themselves, darker and more ambitious than anything that came before it in the series. It is a flawed game with some extraordinary moments, and it represents the most recent chapter in Abe’s story. A separate review is coming to this site — but consider New ‘n’ Tasty your entry point to a series that is very much still alive.