Retrospective: Another World 15th Anniversary Edition

This all sounds rather negative, doesn't it? I think Another World is completely lovely. In fact, I'm beginning to wonder if we've lost something in not having games that work this way any more.

Unquestionably a vast amount of Another World's charm comes from the art style. It's just fantastic. Chahi's design is exquisitely simple and enormously evocative. Built from spare polygons, its paper-craft-like animation conjures the world, the creatures and the threat wonderfully. And never more wonderfully than Chahi's own 15th anniversary remake.

After reacquiring the rights to the game after the original publisher, Delphine, closed in 2004, Chahi ported it to mobile phones, and then in 2006 remade the PC version to work on modern machines. The resolution went up from 320x200 to 1280x800, with repainted backgrounds, and the polygonal characters resized to fit. The result is something far lovelier, and yet completely true to the original design.

The other big difference with the remake is the checkpoint system. There are twice as many of them. Which to a cack-handed buffoon like me makes the game something I like to describe as, "playable". Hardcore fans of the original, or its console ports, will sneer their most wretched sneers at this, but then this is a compromise I demand in return for being required to fail in order to know how to proceed.

However, even the checkpointing is a little trial-and-error. If you choose to go in one of two available directions, in an order other than is required to be successful, it won't recognise this as a time to trigger checkpoints. If I had known this as I played through, I'd have known something was up. Instead I repeated the same godforsaken section in the caves approximately 90,184 times, sobbing blood onto my keyboard.

It sounds negative again, doesn't it?

There's definitely a reason we moved on from trial and error. There's definitely a reason why we demand fairness from games. Failing in order to succeed is a strange attitude, a mindset into which one must insert oneself. You have to pop into the right department of your brain and make a note on a whiteboard saying, "It's okay that I keep dying - don't fling PC through window."

But once your brain is there, and also perhaps once you've found a friendly man showing you how to get through the game on YouTube, it becomes okay to die.

The direction in which Valve is taking games is tremendously exciting. Intuitive design, barely consciously recognised prompting, and behind-the-scenes difficulty rebalancing if you're struggling.

It's creating a single-player standard where it just isn't okay to die. The player is having fun when he's succeeding, winning, overcoming. He isn't having fun when he's being killed by the same boss creature a dozen times in a row. And when a game lasts six to 12 hours, you want to be progressing, seeing what comes next.

But there's room for Another World. Under an hour of start-to-finish content (I imagine it could be completed in a lot less), it's okay in such circumstances to repeat sections again and again. It's about refining technique, practicing before achieving. It's about learning what will get you killed in order to learn what to avoid.

But then it's not just games who've changed. It's players too. I can remember playing this game as a kid, and almost certainly not getting further than the fifth screen. Just getting past the first charging bull-creature is tough enough.

And I was okay with that. I never got past the fifth screen of Chuckie Egg 2, but I must have played it a hundred times. Maybe we had more patience? Perhaps I, perhaps we, were idiots back then. That might well be it. We certainly had different expectations.

Another World, especially in its 15th Anniversary form, is still utterly beautiful. There's something compelling not just about the graphics, but the simplicity of the story. The relationship with your cellmate and friend, the sense of progression against the odds, is calmly and cleverly told.

It's utterly bloody ridiculously hard in places, but then, as it turns out, it's meant to be.