A familiar planet.
Let's start with a history lesson. Another World is one of the classic platformers. First released in 1991 for the humble Amiga, and then ported to basically everything, Another World is one of those very important games in history. Largely built by just Eric Chahi, it did a ton to push forward visual design and cinematography in videogaming. The whole thing is built on a mindset that's more about the hand-crafted animation than anything else, calling to mind the work of Jordan Mechner, or Don Bluth.
I'm telling you all of this because this game is, quite possibly, the one whose context is most important out of everything I've reviewed so far. Another World has been cited as an influence on tons of developers all over the world, helped along by just how many times the thing has been ported to various platforms in the 27 years it's existed.
All of this makes the game a bit of a unique beast, one that's rather hard to review...But let's step back. What if this is your first time hearing about Another World?
Well, first, if you're in the states, you might have known it as Out Of This World, since the original name was changed for legal reasons. But second, let's talk about the actual game. You play as Lester, a physicist for whom a simple experiment goes oh so very awry. It flings open a portal in time, and throws him into the future, where my evil is...
Wait, wait, wait. Wrong notes. Let me start over.
Simple experiment goes very awry, flings open a portal to another world, and Lester thus begins his attempts to escape the dangers here and maybe, just maybe, possibly, survive.
It's going to be harder than that to actually do so, though.
One of the quirks of Another World that really shows its age and era, is how damn difficult the game can be. A lot of situations tend to operate on puzzle-platformer scenarios, where there's a fairly specific set of steps to solve the problem you're dealing with. And rather often, not giving the correct set of answers leads to immediate death.
So that's a thing.
The good news, at least, is that the game is pretty generous about checkpoints, and is pretty linear in design. While it doesn't use full on discrete sectioned levels, getting through a problem tends to pretty firmly give you a checkpoint and say you never have to repeat that part again. So that tough difficulty isn't nearly as difficult to deal with as it's been in some games I've played, even ones with far lower death counts.
Of course, I say that, and I still spent the better part of an hour turning an early-game platforming sequence into raw muscle memory just to deal with one single jump consistently.
It's a bit of a peculiar balance, looked at from the grimdark future hellscape of the year 2018. It's somewhat in the same direction as later super-hard platformers, but unlike something like Super Meat Boy, Another World doesn't quite challenge you as hard and directly, or make a next go quite as quick and painless to get going.
So, as just a game looked at now, it sits at a somewhat odd point on the difficulty chart. Now, that said, if we take history into account, I will freely tell you that it is far more forgiving than a lot of the games I played growing up around the same time. It's just that some of the pieces can fit together a little roughly to the more modern sensibility.
Yet that's only half the discussion. Because this isn't just a game hitting the Switch now. It's a 27 year old game that has seen a lot of versions and updates, and even those updates bring a lot of history.
And that side, that side is interesting. Another World brings echoes of a lot of its various versions, most notably in the form of the soundtrack letting you pick from three separate versions based on three entirely different iterations of the game. The graphics, which tended to be ported a bit more faithfully, don't give you quite as much fine choice, but you do have two key choices: The original chunky pixels, or a new, cleaned up version of the game, which you can swap between with a press of a button, and see in the screenshots here.
It's intriguing, seeing how some of the screens were re-interpreted. But that said, this is one place where I feel the game stumbles. While I actually rather like the look of the updated graphics for actual characters, which always had a slightly papercut look to them that HD resolutions just enhance, the backgrounds tend to be a bit...much. They're just a bit too detailed, in just the wrong ways.
And that part's a shame. If they were kept a little more in line with the aesthetic of the sprites, then I'd be a lot more eager to just leave it on the modern updated graphics and have this super slick sci-fi game that called on the flat, geometric styles of mid-20th-century graphic aesthetic...But alas. And hey, the graphics don't actually hurt the game at all, so it's really a simple choice of what you like better on which way to lean.
Of course, there's one last wrinkle to the game, and that's connected to its historical position. Another World has been ported to a LOT of things. Hell, this isn't even the first portable device it's officially been on; There was already a 3DS and Vita port, of this same anniversary version of the game.
So really, if this is legit your first experience with this game, it's totally worth it. But you've got to really look and ask yourself if that's the case, because statistically speaking, you probably forgot you owned this somewhere. And if that's the case...It's a lot harder to recommend you get another copy, you know? Few people need two or three copies of a dang game.