But in keeping with Oddworld's views on gratuitous violence (and Stranger's as-yet-unexplained dislike of guns), you won't have to kill your bounties. You'll find out who they are, what they've done, and most importantly, how much you'll be paid to bring in their no-good hides. The owner of the local bounty store will tell you about the vicious varmints who are terrorizing the populace. The first thing you'll want to do when you hit a new town in Stranger's Wrath is look around for the bounty store, which has a listing of all the current jobs up for grabs. The game will contain a whopping 5,000 lines of dialogue, and much of it is both hilarious and relevant to the current task at hand. Stranger's baritone provided an amusing contrast to the clakkerz's speech, and we were able to make him speak to any nearby residents at the touch of a button. In the demo we tried, we got to run Stranger around in a town populated by anthropomorphized chickens called clakkerz, who babbled incessantly to each other in the same amusingly nasal, high-strung voice.

As a bounty hunter, you'll travel from town to town in order to interact with the locals and find out what kind of jobs need to be taken care of.

We've come to expect a lot of personality and weird humor in the Oddworld games, and Stranger's Wrath seems not to disappoint in this regard. Stranger's Wrath is the most action-oriented game yet in the Oddworld series. Without giving too much away, we did see some brief footage of action occurring in environments that looked radically different from the dusty, Wild West-themed towns and canyons in the playable section of the game we got to try out. We were told to expect at least one major plot twist well past the halfway mark. The plot thickens!Īpparently, the plot will thicken even further as you progress through the game, but we didn't get any details about how exactly that will happen. And finally, according to Oddworld Inhabitants founder and evangelist Lorne Lanning, he may not be who he appears to be. For another, he dislikes guns, preferring instead to combat his enemies with some truly live ammo (more on that later). For one, he doesn't seem to take any crap from anybody. There are only a few things we know for sure about Stranger. At the outset, Stranger is a mysterious figure, one whose motivations and background are not entirely clear-and Oddworld wants to keep him that way until you've played the whole game and had a chance to experience the storyline in its entirety. He's a rough-and-tumble sort, even a bit of an antihero he's a bounty hunter who, it seems, is mostly just in it for the money. Stranger's Wrath takes place in an entirely different part of Oddworld than we've seen before, and Stranger himself is a totally new kind of protagonist for the series, too. This game is much more action-oriented than previous Oddworld titles, with serious shooting and melee combat elements in addition to some good, old-fashioned platforming.

And from our initial experience, it does seem that Stranger is indeed a wrathful character. Oddworld (the company) has since decided to rechristen its new baby as Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath, first to avoid any pesky copyright conflicts, and more importantly to bring it in line with previous games' titles, such as Abe's Exoddus and Munch's Oddysee.

To be clear, this is indeed the game you've heard of previously as Oddworld Stranger. But don't worry, Oddworld fans-that endearingly crazy sense of humor is still intact. In that light, Oddworld's newest game, Stranger's Wrath, is heading in an action-oriented direction that the developer hasn't previously explored. Mechanically, the previous three Oddworld games have focused on thoughtful puzzle-solving with only light action elements, but the leaders of the company will be the first to admit that the industry is changing as a reflection of audiences' maturing tastes. Since 1997, the quirky developer has used its Oddworld games to establish a particular tone-a particularly wacky tone-while managing to portray serious issues, such as oppression and the defilement of the environment, in a humorous but thoughtful light. The folks at Oddworld Inhabitants have a reputation to maintain.

Oddworld strangers wrath gameplay