6 games similar to Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee — handpicked for fans of Platformer and Puzzle and Action games.
Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee carved out a unique niche in 1997 with its blend of cinematic puzzle-platforming, darkly satirical storytelling, and a rescue mechanic that made every mudokon you saved feel genuinely earned. If you’re drawn to platformers that demand patience and lateral thinking over raw reflexes, and you love games with a subversive sense of humor and a world that feels grimly alive, these picks will scratch that same itch. Each one shares some essential DNA with Abe’s Oddysee — whether it’s the cinematic presentation, the puzzle-forward design, the quirky tone, or the sheer commitment to an atmospheric world that rewards exploration and careful play.
DOS / SNES / Amiga | 1991
Another World is arguably the single most direct ancestor of Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee, and playing it reveals exactly where Abe’s cinematic DNA came from. Éric Chahi’s masterpiece drops you into an alien environment as physicist Lester Knight Chaykin with zero explanation, no HUD, and zero hand-holding — survival requires reading the environment and dying repeatedly to understand each screen’s hidden logic. The rotoscoped animation and polygon cutscenes were jaw-dropping in 1991 and still feel cinematic today. Like Abe, you form an unlikely bond with an alien creature and must use improvised cooperation to escape a hostile world. If Oddworld’s atmosphere of vulnerability and wonder resonated with you, Another World is essential.
Mega Drive / SNES / DOS | 1992
Flashback sits right alongside Another World as a defining example of the cinematic platformer, and its influence on Oddworld is unmistakable. You play as Conrad B. Hart, an agent with amnesia navigating a conspiracy across alien planets, using careful movement, a limited energy shield, and a holographic decoy to outsmart enemies rather than overpower them. The rotoscoped animation gives every action a weight and deliberateness that feels deeply familiar to Abe fans — one mistimed jump and you’re dead. The puzzle-solving emphasis, the narrative-heavy approach to action, and the sense of being outgunned in a dangerous world make Flashback a natural companion piece to Abe’s Oddysee.
PlayStation | 1997
Released the same year as Abe’s Oddysee and on the same platform, Klonoa: Door to Phantomile is a puzzle-platformer with an emotional depth that belies its colorful surface. Klonoa can grab enemies with a wind ring and use them as projectile weapons or double-jump boosters, meaning enemy positioning becomes a puzzle element in every room — exactly the kind of environmental problem-solving that Abe fans thrive on. The game has a surprisingly melancholy story that catches you off guard after its cheerful opening hours, echoing Oddworld’s own tonal switch between dark satire and genuine stakes. The tight level design and the emphasis on mastering one or two mechanics across an entire game will feel immediately comfortable to anyone who spent time learning Abe’s GameSpeak system.
Mega Drive / SNES | 1994
Earthworm Jim shares Oddworld’s gleefully weird sensibility — a platformer that constantly undercuts its own genre conventions with absurdist humor and bizarre enemy design. Jim is a regular earthworm granted cosmic power by a super suit, and the levels he navigates are parodies of action movie clichés delivered with a Tex Avery energy that never gets old. While the gameplay is more action-focused than Abe’s deliberate puzzle pace, Earthworm Jim demands the same appreciation for creative level gimmicks and rewards players who explore rather than barrel through. The dark, slightly gross humor, the sense that the game’s world has its own twisted internal logic, and the emphasis on spectacle over pure mechanical challenge make it a must for Oddworld fans with a taste for the ridiculous.
PlayStation | 1998
MediEvil arrived on PlayStation just a year after Abe’s Oddysee, and it shares the same commitment to building a world with genuine personality and dark comedic undertones. You play as Sir Daniel Fortesque, a cowardly knight resurrected as a skeleton hero, navigating Gothic environments filled with undead enemies and environmental puzzles that require careful item management. The game’s tone — equal parts spooky and silly — captures the same satirical warmth that made Abe’s Oddysee memorable beyond its mechanics. MediEvil also rewards exploration and experimentation, hiding upgrades and secrets that change how you approach later sections. PS1 owners who connected with the Oddworld universe’s blend of grotesque design and genuine heart will find a lot to love here.
Super Nintendo | 1992
Soul Blazer is the most mechanically resonant pick on this list for Abe’s Oddysee fans because its entire design loop revolves around freeing enslaved beings from monster lairs. You clear dungeons, defeat monster generators, and watch the overworld literally repopulate with the townspeople, animals, and plants that had been absorbed — the same fundamental satisfaction of rescuing all 299 mudokons, translated into a top-down action RPG. The game has a quiet philosophical streak about creation, destruction, and responsibility that sits in the same thematic space as Oddworld’s environmentalist allegory. If what you loved most about Abe’s Oddysee was the feeling that the NPCs you rescued actually mattered and changed the world around you, Soul Blazer delivers that feeling across an entire game.
Mega Drive | 1995
Comix Zone is one of the most audaciously designed games of the 16-bit era, putting you inside a living comic book where you must navigate panel-by-panel through increasingly dangerous pages. The game demands that you think about every action carefully — you have limited health, and even the environment can be weaponized against you if you know to look. The punk aesthetic and the knowing, self-aware presentation give Comix Zone an irreverent edge that Oddworld fans will recognize immediately. Most importantly, it’s one of the rare platformers of its era that felt genuinely cinematic in a way that anticipated where games like Abe’s Oddysee were heading, using the comic panel format to do things with storytelling and pacing that no other game had attempted.
PlayStation / PC / Saturn | 1995
Rayman launched on PlayStation two years before Abe’s Oddysee and established a template for visually stunning, mechanically demanding platformers that treated the player as someone worth challenging. The game’s difficulty is uncompromising — levels are long, checkpoints are sparse, and precision is everything — which creates the same grinding satisfaction that comes from finally getting a tricky Oddworld screen right after a dozen deaths. Rayman’s world is a surrealist dreamscape with its own internal visual logic, and the game’s commitment to that aesthetic over commercial accessibility makes it feel like a spiritual cousin to Oddworld’s uncompromising worldbuilding. If you played Abe’s Oddysee for the difficulty and the atmosphere as much as the puzzles, Rayman will feel immediately familiar.
The thread that ties all of these recommendations together is a commitment to the cinematic platformer philosophy: the idea that a game can deliver the pacing and atmosphere of a film while still demanding genuine player mastery. Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee was not a genre innovator so much as a perfector — it took the cinematic language pioneered by Another World and Flashback, combined it with the environmental puzzle-solving of SNES-era action games, and wrapped everything in a darkly comedic world that felt completely realized. Every game on this list shares at least one of those three pillars, and the best of them share all three.
The puzzle design philosophy is the most consistent link. These are not games where you move fast and react instinctively. They are games where you stop, look at a screen or a room, and work out what is being asked of you. Klonoa, Soul Blazer, and Comix Zone all demand that kind of deliberate thinking, and the reward — the click of understanding followed by clean execution — is identical to the feeling of finally possessing the right Slig at the right moment in Oddworld. The games that lean more toward action, like Earthworm Jim and Rayman, still embed that puzzle-forward thinking into their level design; you just might need to punch something while you’re figuring it out.
Tone is the other great unifier. Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee used its grotesque factory setting and enslaved mudokon workforce to tell a story that was simultaneously funny, bleak, and weirdly hopeful. That combination — dark subject matter delivered with wry humor and genuine emotional investment — runs through MediEvil, Earthworm Jim, and the melancholy twist of Klonoa’s ending in different ways. These are games made by developers who understood that players respond to worlds with personality, and who were willing to let that personality get uncomfortable or strange in service of the story they were telling.
Finally, there is the matter of world-building through design rather than exposition. None of these games spend much time explaining themselves. Another World drops you on an alien planet and trusts you to piece together what is happening from context. Flashback gives you amnesia and makes the mystery part of the gameplay. Soul Blazer shows you a repopulating world without a lengthy tutorial about what you are doing and why. Oddworld worked exactly the same way — Rupture Farms tells you everything about Glukkon capitalism and mudokon exploitation through its visual design, not its cutscenes. If you love games that respect your intelligence enough to show rather than tell, every pick on this list will feel like home.
If you are new to the cinematic platformer genre and Abe’s Oddysee was your entry point, start with Klonoa: Door to Phantomile. It is the most mechanically accessible game on this list while still delivering the puzzle satisfaction and emotional storytelling that made Oddworld memorable, and since it launched the same year on the same platform it feels like a natural companion piece. From there, MediEvil makes an excellent second stop for the PS1 atmosphere, and Rayman will give you the difficulty spike that proves the genre has genuine teeth. Save Another World and Flashback for when you are ready to understand where the whole lineage came from — they are short games (two to four hours each) but they will recontextualize everything you have played up to that point.
For players who connected most strongly with Oddworld’s rescue mechanic and its sense of moral consequence, prioritize Soul Blazer before anything else on the list. It is older and the action RPG mechanics may feel dated at first, but the core loop of freeing beings and watching a world rebuild around you is more directly satisfying than anything else here. Keep in mind that most of these games share Abe’s Oddysee’s willingness to kill you often and without apology — that is a feature, not a flaw. The deaths teach you the rules, and the rules are what make each success feel genuinely earned.
| Feature | Platform | Year | Score | Genre |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Klonoa: Door to Phantomile | PLAYSTATION | 1997 | 9 | Platformer |
| Earthworm Jim | SEGA-GENESIS | 1994 | 9 | Platformer, Action |
| MediEvil | PLAYSTATION | 1998 | 8.5 | Action Adventure, Hack and Slash |
| Rayman | PLAYSTATION | 1995 | 8.5 | Platformer |
| Soul Blazer | SNES | 1992 | 8.6 | Action, RPG |
| Comix Zone | SEGA-GENESIS | 1995 | 8.7 | Beat 'em Up, Action |
.png)
One of the most emotionally affecting platformers ever made. Klonoa's wind bullet mechanic and 2.5D layered stages create inventive puzzle-platforming, then the story builds to a conclusion that genuinely surprised players expecting a cheerful children's game — its final moments are among gaming's most unexpectedly affecting narrative sequences.
.png)
The animated platformer that took the 16-bit era by storm — Earthworm Jim's fluid hand-drawn animation, creative stage design, and irreverent humor made it the independent platformer sensation of 1994.
.png)
Sir Daniel Fortesque, a cowardly knight who died to the first arrow in his first battle and was reborn as a skeleton hero 100 years later, must defeat the sorcerer Zarok and earn his place in the Hall of Heroes. MediEvil is a beloved PlayStation classic blending gothic humor, inventive level design, and one of gaming's most charming protagonists.
.png)
Ubisoft's limbless platformer that demonstrated hand-drawn animation quality could survive the PS1 era. Rayman's precision platforming, vibrant worlds, and the titular hero's fist-throwing mechanics made it the PS1's best non-Nintendo platformer — and one of the few games of the era to rival the visual quality of 16-bit 2D.
.png)
The first entry in Quintet's soul trilogy — Soul Blazer has the player acting as an angel defeating demons and restoring souls to a corrupted world, resurrecting villagers and NPCs as enemies are cleared.
.png)
Sega's most original late-Genesis game — a beat-em-up set inside a comic book, where the protagonist fights panel-to-panel, enemies are drawn to life by the villain, and the player can tear panels to make paper airplanes as weapons.