This is a platformer for the Mega Drive from the early 90s. I’m pretty sure I got this as a Christmas present the year that it came out in the UK. It’s a hard game though, I never completed it back then. I think maybe I got about halfway.
The game has a cyberpunk dystopian story where you have lost all your memories and are being attacked by aliens. You start the game waking up on an alien world with no idea where you are. Once you have regained your memory in level two it turns out that a percentage of the world’s population are actually aliens. They appear human through sight alone, but you discovered their presence after developing a special headset.
The character movements are all very deliberate. They are realistic and not as exaggerated as most platform games make them. According to Wikipedia this particular style of platformer is called a Cinematic Platformer, which is a term I never heard at the time. I seem to remember people talking about this as if it was a sequel to Another World, although the games are completely separate.
Graphically, it’s extremely impressive. There are animated cut scenes in this game, which is unusual for a 16-bit game. I also like the level design, the second level in particular has you performing jobs around a city for cash. The level even has a working subway system, and a handful of characters that you interact with, each having their own little story.
Unfortunately the game ramps up the difficulty with each level by adding more and more enemies to fight. It’s all a bit frustrating since the fighting mechanics are the worst part of the game. It is a common pattern in this style of game I find, where the exploration and puzzle solving is significantly more interesting than the fiddly combat. Another World is similar, and in fact later 3D games in the same vein are too. Tomb Raider, including its remakes and later re-imaginings as well as the Uncharted series all follow the same pattern. I feel like I want to spend my time in the world figuring out how to traverse the environment but end up spending the majority of my time shooting people.