Out of This World

"A challenging and frustrating puzzle/adventure game"

STORY
I've read some reviews of this game where the writers had not realized there was an intro movie, you just have to let the main screen sit there a while. Not that the story makes much sense anyway, but it does explain why the game starts with you appearing from nowhere at your desk in the middle of a pool of water. You play the part of some kind of physicist who stumbles into an alien world through a scientific mishap. After that, it's all about survival. This game features no dialogue (except the intro), no character development, and an ending that doesn't really conclude anything.

MUSIC
This game's musical score isn't very varied, but it's effective. The 'danger' music is pretty effective at getting the old fight-or-flight feeling going. The rest of the time, the music is good at setting the tone for a dark, dangerous world trying to kill you. The sounds just get pretty repetitive after a while though, especially since you keep dying.

GAMEPLAY
This early SNES game reminds me of some Flash games I've played before where you have to click on certain items in a scene to make them do something (pull a lever, drop a crate, etc.) and you have to do everything in a certain order to beat the level. Similarly, OOTW is played purely by trial-and-error, and the problem with that is, an "error" means either having to restart the 'level', or death, which is the same thing. And boy, are there sure alot of ways to screw up at this game. Even knowing what to do, I still keep dying trying to do it. I can't imagine playing this game without save states, it just seems impossible to keep going without getting fed up. This game is pretty challenging, and definitely not for young kids in that respect. You've got a lot of things going against you:
1) every enemy can kill you in one hit, and some aren't so easy to avoid
2) you have to follow a certain order of doing things or you just can't progress
3) unarmed, you have a pathetic little kick, and even the gun you get is unwieldy and runs out of power
4) at some points, you have to keep yourself and a NPC alive

CONTROLS
The controls aren't all that great. This is an adventure game but you are not really suited to be an adventurer. This game would be alot easier if you played as someone like Samus from Metroid, even minus the arm cannon. Your "jump" is actually more of a hop, you are useless without a gun, and running from your problems usually doesn't work (just like in real life). Your character is just not maneuverable, and you usually have to time things just right or you won't jump far enough, or avoid that obstacle, or clear that pit, etc, etc.

VISUALS
The one thing I do like about this game is the visuals. Most of the time, it looks like a low-res version of mortal kombat 1, but the cutscenes, which are few and far between, are really surprising, especially this shot of the alien city seen from the top of a tower. There's this pseudo-3D/cel-shading thing going on that I never expected to see it on the SNES. The graphics, which are somewhere in between cartoonish and realistic, add to the "other-worldly" feel of the game. They're ugly by today's standards, though.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 12/11/08

Game Release: Out of This World (US, November 1992)