Out of this World / Another World

Okay so I fired up Out of This World again last weekend — the 1991 Éric Chahi one, not to be confused with literally anything else with a similar name, which, side note, why do so many games from that era have these generic sci-fi titles, I once spent 20 minutes trying to find a ROM because I mixed it up with Outer World — anyway. This game. This GAME.

First thing — the opening cutscene still slaps. No dialogue, no HUD, no tutorial popup telling you to "press A to jump," just a guy in a lab coat driving a Ferrari (a Ferrari, in a lab, don't ask, I've made my peace with it) doing science during a thunderstorm, and then BAM, lightning strikes his particle accelerator and he gets teleported to an alien planet. As someone who has personally caused three production outages, I felt this on a spiritual level.

The animation is rotoscoped, which — okay, real talk, I went down a rabbit hole for like 45 minutes reading about how Chahi built his own animation engine using polygons instead of sprites to save memory, and honestly it's one of those things where you can tell one guy built this entire thing basically solo and had Opinions about every pixel. There's something almost obsessive about it, very "I will not sleep until the walk cycle is correct," which, respect. I get like that with commit messages.

Gameplay-wise it's brutal in the way old games are brutal — trial and death, memorize the pattern, die again, no save-scumming mercy, and normally I'd bounce off that immediately because I have the patience of a caffeinated squirrel, but something about the atmosphere just keeps pulling me back in. It's moody. It's quiet. There's barely any music, which sounds like a negative but it's not, it makes the alien world feel actually alien and lonely instead of like a theme park ride.

Combat is minimal, puzzles are environmental, and there's this whole thread about your character teaming up with an alien prisoner which, no spoilers, but it's weirdly touching for a game that's mostly you getting disintegrated by energy blasts. Also I will die on the hill that the ending is one of the most understated, melancholy game endings ever made and nobody talks about it enough.

Would I recommend it? Yes, absolutely, but go in knowing it's short (like 2-3 hours if you're not banging your head against a wall), it's unforgiving, and there's no map, no quest log, no little arrow telling you where to go — it just trusts you to pay attention, which, in 2026, feels almost radical. Also emulate it or get the remaster, do NOT try to run the original DOS version unless you enjoy suffering in a different, more configuration-related way.

9/10, would get teleported to an alien planet via lab-coat-Ferrari-lightning-incident again.