Another World is the first game that I played that left me stunned as the ending sequence played out. The story told is about an experimental physicist who has an accident while playing with a particle accelerator during a lightning storm and finds himself transported to another world. Which is mega convenient as that happens to be the title of the game too. The new world he finds himself in is unsurprisingly alien and predictably hostile, populated as it is by feral slinkies, rabid dog-creatures, man-eating plants and large, pink, golem types.

The beauty of the game came from its cinematic nature. The graphics were simple but effective and the animation was superb - especially the lead character which had been rotoscoped from the movements of a real human. The gameplay itself was largely a mystery in so far that you had basic movements to learn (left, right, jump, crouch, run, hit) but occasionally you’d find yourself in situations where you’d have to think a little outside the box (or, in one case, inside the box) and work out how to apply those same movements to a problem. While a puzzle might stump at first, thinking about how you might solve it in real life often helps.

A good example of this is a particular scene when you are trapped in a vehicle and have to hit the right button to escape. None of the buttons are labelled and some of them do unexpected things. It might feel to some players that this is a little unfair, so accustomed are they to having obvious solutions to puzzles or at least means to identify how to solve a problem without recourse to trial and error. But picture the situation: you’re a human being trapped on in an alien vehicle on an alien planet and you’re up against the odds. What are you going to do? Complain about how unfair it is that you can’t read the labels or punch the buttons in desperation until something useful happens? In this sense, the game puts you directly in the position of the character.

To be honest, the downside of Another World is that it’s actually quite hard. Puzzles aside, combat is difficult and while it only takes one shot to kill an enemy, it also only takes one shot to kill you. The jumping portions of the game rely on almost pixel perfect accuracy and exact timing and while the puzzles have an invariably elegant solution (or not so elegant depending on your point of view) there is usually only one solution to any given problem meaning that death is inevitable on a first run through for the most part.

The atmosphere of the game, however, totally redeems it from any misgivings about the difficulty. There’s a real pathos in a story of survival in an alien world, particularly when you befriend one of the golem folk who is also on the run. Gameplay is almost secondary to a real sense of being in an interactive story which never lets up on forcing you to ask “How am I going to get out of this now?” and this feeling persists all the way through to the climax and an ending which, I feel, is one of the most memorable in video game history.

Anothe World hasn’t aged particularly well but even so the developer, Eric Chahi, recently updated the game for Windows XP, enabling high resolution graphics and repackaging the game with some extra puzzles from the original DOS version of the game that weren’t featured in the Amiga release. There’s a demo or for the miserly sum of 7 euros you can buy the full game at the Another World site.