It was 1998. I was in year 4, and I was at the height of my tomboy phase. My family lived in a street where every house had kids roughly my age, and we were all pretty keen gamers. Our street was a pretty even split of N64 and Playstation owners, with the exception of a poorer family who ‘only owned a Mega Drive’ (probably because they had about eight kids) that led to my only childhood encounter with Sonic the Hedgehog. We didn’t even have a console. It wasn’t that my younger brother and I didn’t want one, we were nuts for them. But we had our PC, and I was right into X-Wing VS TIE-Fighter at the time, and there was no way something that cool could be on a console, right? So my parents had agreed it wasn’t really necessary, even if we nagged them time to time.

So one day, my brother and I are playing with Hot Wheels cars in the dirt in front of our mailbox (like I said, tomboy) when my dad pulls up in the driveway home from work. ‘I’ve got a surprise for you’, he says, carrying a giant plastic bag. My brother drops his cars in excitement and proclaims ‘it’s a NINTENDO 64!’ We abandon the dirt mound and run inside to the living room. Only it’s not a Nintendo 64. It’s a Playstation. More specifically, it’s the $199 bundle with Gran Turismo and the DualShock controller. My brother immediately chucks a tantrum, kicking and screaming about how he wanted a N64. But I couldn’t care less, we’d won our parents over and could finally feel like we belonged with the local kids.

It turned out that I was awful at Gran Turismo. It took me several months to even pass the first test on the basic license – the one where you accelerate for 1 km and stop in a designated box. But as a result, I’ll never forget the intro to Ash’s ‘Lose Control’, that soundtrack was way ahead of its time. What actually drew me into the Playstation was the Demo 1 disc (sampler 9, if my memory serves me correctly). You’d know this one, it had the T-Rex and Manta Ray interactive tech demos. I spent countless hours alone on the T-Rex demo, zooming in and out on details trying to work out how something so complicated could be rendered in 3D. I was pretty easily impressed, but what nine year old wasn’t at the time? Of course, the games on this demo disc were the real draw card, and led me to some of my lifelong favourites. One particular demo had me from the get go. That game was Abe’s Oddysee.

The atmosphere! Voice acting! The puzzles! I’d never played anything like it. I hadn’t really played any violent video games at that point, with the exception of Mortal Kombat at a friend’s house. I had no urge to play them either, probably because my parents didn’t try to stop me. My brother and I were given the choice to pick a game from the demos we played to buy, he chose Hercules and I was sold on Abe’s Oddysee. My parents obliged. Boy was that a mistake. The subsequent nightmares I had from this game lasted for months, even though I kept playing it. The Guardian Angel commercial still gives me chills.

Abe’s Oddysee is a game about taking away your empowerment, leaving you a scrawny factory worker with only his wits and gift of speech to aid him. Also it’s a game about dying in all sorts of gruesome ways that would make Éric Chahi jealous. At the time this was probably the most graphically advanced video game I had the pleasure of playing, even today the composition of the backgrounds and the quality of the visual effects will surprise me. At a period when 3D games were honestly quite rudimentary, the creative decision to use pre-rendered sprites definitely worked in favour for the developer. I’d imagine the puzzles would not have been anywhere near as complex if they had to rely on a 3D engine.

Each level had such a distinct design, particularly how they played with silhouettes and hid things in corners or behind parts of the foreground with only an audio cue to guide you. While I probably spent most of my time being stuck defusing bombs in the Rupture Farms levels (I still have to psych myself up to do it!), my favourite were the Monsaic Lines stages that acted as relatively peaceful bridges between more action-packed gameplay. Of course, the Elum stages were pretty fun too, if you could get a grasp of how slippery the movement on him was.

However, the real selling point of Abe’s Oddysee for a kid? The ability to talk, whistle and fart your way through all sorts of situations. The moment you launch the game and Abe pops up in the start screen with that grinning ‘hello!’ – you knew you were in for a good time. By having players rely on speech and wits, rather than brute force (though grenades and bees were sometimes an option), the game expanded a lot of the puzzle possibilities. Whistling Simon Says-style puzzles were pretty common in the Monsaic Lines stages, but the real fun came when you could possess enemies to your advantage. I engaged in my own inner sadist plenty of times to trick other Sligs into meat grinders, or even torturing the very Mudokons I was supposed to be rescuing. It offered a great sense of freedom that I hadn’t seen in a game before.

Oh, and let’s not forget this beautiful gem of animation that promoted Munch’s Oddysee with a bunch of Oddworld characters. I remember only being able to download 15 second clips on a dial-up connection as a pre-teen, but thought every second was SO COOL. I guess I can forgive my 12 year old self for being swept up by a break-dancing Abe.

As a kid who had very limited experience with puzzle games, let alone platformers, this game was tough. It required precise timing and a lot of trial and error that I’m sure I wouldn’t set aside the time for now. When you’re a kid, you have no fear of failure. You’ll try anything once, twice, three times even. I would give anything to be that carefree with video games again. Whether it was because you were determined to get your pocket money’s worth out of a game, or because you weren’t going to let a dumb computer tell you that you’re not good enough – bring it on.