Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus

odyssey already had enough jank to make me go ugh, but this is just the worst. It takes the first games concept and adds instances where you need to deal with the emotions of followers that factor into the escape, so now you can tell them to work as they proceed to not be able to understand what you mean and not turn the tube, upon being slapped they'll glitch out and slap you and the other follower. Then to make things worse it's even more awkward to save mudokons since the bird portals are now temporary! You can't just skip the saving aspect either, no, now you need to have mudokons following you to use them to solve certain puzzles which just makes this so much worse. I can respect the first game even if I felt it was rough. I really loved a lot of what it brought to the table. This just felt it had to be sillier and more comical with the mudokons, rehash the first story but with lower stakes and now it's overcomplicating puzzle mechanics with gimmicks which are even slippier than the sligs. This wasn't great in diggles, it's not great here. Just add more platforming or stealth mechanics and tone down the "what if the collectathon was with people" aspect. Like it's a major issue that wasn't great back then in any game, escort mechanics in modern games are still extraordinarily tough to make good, but I felt odyssey was alright about it. So to see it double down on things that are objectively worse is extremely questionable. I feel these positive reviews either don't remember how good odyssey already was, and how much worse this is in comparison because of it.