The long wait for Oddworld: Soulstorm is over soon, as Oddworld Inhabitants said the game is coming April 6 on the PlayStation platform. CEO Lorne Lanning made the announcement at its State of Play online event today.
The game is looking much better in terms of rich environments and characters. The game is a reimagining of the 1998 title Oddworld: Abe’s Exoddus, and I got a first look at the game way back in May 2019 at Oddworld Inhabitants in Emeryville, California. But today, Lanning mentioned for the first time that the game will have haptic feedback from Sony’s DualSense wireless controller, which will enable you to feel the heartbeat of the main character.
Oddworld Inhabitants has been telling the interactive story of Abe for more than two decades. And now it has shown off the first look at the gameplay for the sequel to 2014’s Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty.
Oddworld has sold more than 15 million games to date, and New ‘n’ Tasty sold more than 3.5 million copies over the past five years. That gave Lanning a bigger budget to work with. Lanning has been working on Soulstorm for four years with a team led by executive producer Bennie Terry. It’s a distributed team, with partners working on the title at Frima Studio in Canada as well as Fat Kraken Studios in England.
In Soulstorm, Abe, a meek slave among the Mudokon, discovers that his people will be slaughtered for food in a meat factory at RuptureFarms, and he escapes. Then he leads a revolution to rescue the slaves at the farm.
The game is a side-scrolling platformer like the original title. But as you can see in the trailer, the perspective is more like “2.9D,” as Lanning calls it. You control Abe, and you pick up followers who can help you with various tasks. They join you in a kind of chain. But you can also see 3D aspects in the foreground and the background.
You can play as a pacifist, not killing any of the enemies, or fight as much as you want, Lanning said. Oddworld: Soulstorm is the second in a quintology.
Your job is to try to save the more than 1,000 Mudokons, and you’ll be able to harness their collective energy. As you traverse the 2.9D environments, you will scavenge for necessary resources by pickpocketing enemies, looting lockers, and sifting through trash cans. Exchange them at vending machines to get products that you can use or even, for the first time in Oddworld history, give to your followers. This gives you more agency in how you chose to conquer the game’s many challenges.
And there will be times when you need an armed army of Mudokons behind you, as the oppressive Glukkons have other plans and will use every means at their well-funded disposal, from propaganda to brute force.
Abe’s best ability is his mystic power of possession, which will enable you to take control of your foes and use their strength and weapons against them. Possession can be used to activate locks and switches to gain entrance to restricted or hidden areas in the game. The game has both action and stealth elements. The environments include dark caves, heavily fortified industrial sites, and ancient lands and ruins.
Details on a physical release will be announced at a later date.