Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee

Overview

RuptureFarms is the biggest meat processing facility on Oddworld, and Abe has worked there his whole life. He mops floors. He doesn’t ask questions. He doesn’t read the signs that aren’t meant for him.

Then, one night, he reads one. And what it says is that he’s next.

Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee (1997) begins with industrial slavery and ends with either liberation or tragedy, depending on how many of your people you save along the way. In between is one of the most original platformers of the PS1 era — a dark satire built around communication, possession, and the practical difficulty of getting a panicking crowd of alien creatures to the exit without getting shot.

The World

Oddworld is a fantasy planet with a coherent industrial history. The Magog Cartel runs corporations that have systematically consumed every natural resource — the wildlife is gone, the ecosystems are depleted, and the remaining profit opportunity is the enslaved workforce. RuptureFarms’ new product line isn’t a response to innovation; it’s a desperate measure when there’s nothing left to exploit.

This backstory, communicated through RuptureFarms’ posters and company announcements that play overhead as Abe navigates the factory floors, gives the game’s dark comedy a layer of genuine satire. The labor exploitation themes, the corporate euphemisms for horrific practices, and the easy-listening jingles about productivity over slavery weren’t subtle in 1997 and have become less subtle with time.

GameSpeak and Possession

Abe’s toolkit is unusual for a platformer. He jumps, he runs, he pulls levers. But his distinguishing abilities are communicative: GameSpeak allows him to issue spoken commands to fellow Mudokons — Follow Me, Wait, All O’ Ya — using the R1 button and face buttons. Getting a group of Mudokons from a holding area to a rescue portal requires commanding them through hazards, past guards, and across gaps, while Abe navigates separately.

Chanting extends this further: Abe can focus a sustained psychic chant at Slig guards, gradually possessing their bodies and assuming direct control. A possessed Slig can shoot guards that Abe couldn’t approach, flip switches that required soldier authorization, or simply walk into hazards. Making a possessed Slig explode can clear a room of guards. These possessed sequences are the game’s key puzzle tools.

99 Mudokons

Abe’s Oddysee has two endings. In the bad ending, RuptureFarms’ executives announce that they couldn’t stop Abe, but there’s enough Mudokon paste from the workers who didn’t escape to get the new product line started. The executives are eventually saved by Abe’s spiritual guides, the Mudokons are free, and the closing narration is grim.

In the good ending — achieved by rescuing all 99 Mudokons — the spiritual guides destroy RuptureFarms entirely. The closing narration describes Abe’s apotheosis into Oddworld’s spiritual tradition.

The difference between endings depends on 99 separate rescue decisions made across the game, each requiring Abe to pause, locate a trapped Mudokon, guide it safely to a portal, and move on without losing any other Mudokons in the process. Perfect rescue playthroughs are demanding and satisfying. Partial rescue playthroughs still earn an ending, but it confirms something you’d rather not hear confirmed.

Legacy

Abe’s Oddysee was a landmark PS1 release in 1997, selling well and receiving critical recognition for its originality, atmospheric design, and thematic coherence. The sequel Abe’s Exoddus (1998) shipped only a year later with expanded mechanics and 300 Mudokons to rescue. The franchise continued through the Xbox and PC eras before the 2014 remake brought Abe back to current platforms.

The game’s labor satire — its specific vision of a world where every creature is either a product or a worker — has become more rather than less resonant in the decades since. Abe’s Oddysee is not the most subtle game ever made, but it is one of the clearest: this is what happens when things are valued only by what they produce.