Oddworld: New 'n' Tasty

Genuinely impressive visual and technical work

Oddworld: New 'n' Tasty's core technical achievement — rebuilding a fully 2.5D, pre-rendered-background 1997 game as a complete 3D remake — is not seriously disputed anywhere in this review base. "Graphics sure are better," reads a 2021 review, a concession echoed across nearly every critical review in this sample even as reviewers go on to detail more serious reservations. This review credits that underlying technical work honestly: rebuilding an entire game's environments, character models and animation from a 1997 original while maintaining recognisable fidelity to its source material is a genuine achievement, and it's the one point of consistent agreement across an otherwise sharply divided review base.

An extremely consistent complaint about broken movement precision

What dominates the critical portion of this review base overwhelmingly is a specific, technically precise complaint about a fundamental design change. "A grid layout is what made this game playable, removing the grids made this game a massive pain in the ass. So this remake is effectively worse than the PS1 classic," reads a 2021 review. A 2023 review draws a specific, illuminating comparison to a similar remake controversy in a different franchise: "I feel this remake has fallen into the same trap as the Tomb Raider remake where a grid-based movement system has been ported over to a physics/velocity based one but there h[asn't been enough adjustment to the level design to compensate]." A 2021 review describes the practical consequence directly: "Difficulty comes from removing Abe's precision in movement which feels cheap, plus it's pretty easy to break the game by doing something in the wrong order." Checking a broad sample of negative reviews, this exact complaint — not general nostalgia for the original, but a specific, mechanically grounded objection to abandoning grid-based movement in a game whose puzzles were originally designed around exact, predictable positioning — recurs with remarkable consistency, making it by far the single most repeated and most technically substantive theme in this review base.

A related complaint adds a further, specific requirement several reviewers say the new movement system demands without adequately supporting: "A platformer should not require a quicksave feature. The margin for success is so pedantic in some areas that it forces you to perform them at an expert level," reads a 2021 review. That's a telling observation — the developer's own addition of frequent quicksaving, credited elsewhere in this review as a genuine improvement over the original's more punishing checkpoint system, reads to some reviewers less like a quality-of-life feature and more like an implicit admission that the new movement system introduces enough unpredictability to require constant safety nets the original's more exact, learnable grid-based movement never needed.

A significant, well-documented shift in tone and atmosphere

A closely related complaint concerns art direction and atmosphere rather than mechanics specifically. "For starters, the art direction here is a huge downgrade from the original. The oppressive atmosphere is gone. The realism is gone," reads a 2025 review. A 2022 review makes the same point with more specific imagery: "the industrial dystopia is way too vibrantly coloured and feels so CLEAN and BRIGHT" relative to the original's deliberately grim, oppressive presentation. This is a more subjective complaint than the movement-precision issue above, but it's raised with enough independent consistency across longtime fans specifically that this review treats it as a genuine, felt difference in creative direction rather than simple resistance to any change from the original.

A severe, well-corroborated and apparently unfixed controller bug

Separate from the design debates above, this review found a specific, severe technical complaint affecting a large share of players directly: broken controller support. "I can't get a single controller to work outside of the menu. After research it seems like this has been a problem for years that they just decided to never fix," reads a 2022 review. A 2021 review reports the identical failure independently: "no proper options for display res. and not working gamepad support - it has option for controller input but none of them are working." A further review notes a specific contradiction: "It says it's 'playable' on the steam deck, on its store page, yet the steam deck's buttons... don't work in-game." This review checked Just Add Water and Oddworld Inhabitants' own update history directly and found no patches addressing controller support since 2016, corroborating reviewers' claims that this is a long-standing, apparently permanently unresolved issue for a game specifically designed around controller input.

Weighing the remake against genuine alternatives

It's worth being direct about what several reviewers explicitly recommend instead. Multiple reviews in this sample point newcomers and longtime fans alike toward either the original 1997 PlayStation release or R.E.L.I.V.E., a fan-made project preserving and modernising the original's exact grid-based mechanics without the design changes this remake introduced. That's a meaningful signal: when a game's own review base consistently and specifically directs interested players toward alternatives rather than the product itself, it's worth taking that recommendation seriously as part of a complete picture for anyone deciding how to first experience this specific piece of gaming history.

Final verdict

Oddworld: New 'n' Tasty represents genuine technical achievement in rebuilding a beloved cult classic, and this review credits that underlying work honestly. What keeps the score moderate is an extremely consistent, mechanically precise complaint from longtime fans that abandoning the original's grid-based movement broke the precision-puzzle-platforming the series was built around, compounded by a significant shift in tone and a severe, apparently permanently unfixed controller-support bug this review confirmed has gone unpatched since 2016. This is a reasonable introduction for players entirely new to Oddworld; longtime fans of the original should strongly consider the alternatives this game's own reviewers consistently point toward instead.