Another World is a cinematic platform action-adventure game designed by Éric Chahi and published by Delphine Software in November 1991. In North America it was published as Out of This World. The game tells the story of Lester, a young scientist who, as a result of an experiment gone wrong, finds himself on a dangerous alien world where he is forced to fight for his survival.
Another World was developed by Chahi alone over a period of about two years, with help with the soundtrack from Jean-François Freitas. Chahi developed his own game engine, creating all the game's art and animations in vector form to reduce memory use, with some use of rotoscoping to help plan out character movements. Both narratively and gameplay-wise, he wanted the game to be told with little to no language or user-interface elements. The game was originally developed for the Amiga and Atari ST but has since been widely ported to other contemporary systems, including home and portable consoles and mobile devices. Chahi has since overseen release of various anniversary releases of the game.
Another World was innovative in its use of cinematic effects in both real-time and cutscenes, which earned the game praise among critics and commercial success. It also influenced a number of other video games and designers, inspiring such titles as Ico, Metal Gear Solid, Silent Hill, and Delphine's later Flashback. It is now considered among the best video games ever made.
Gameplay
thumb|left|The first level of the [[Sega Genesis version, with Lester climbing out of the pond into which he has been teleported]]
Another World is a platform game, featuring a control scheme where the player uses either the keyboard, joystick or gamepad to make the protagonist run, jump, attack and perform other, situation-specific actions, such as rocking a cage back and forth. In the initial part of the game, the player's character Lester is unarmed. He is able to kick at small creatures, but is otherwise defenseless.
Later in the game, the player acquires a laser pistol from a fallen foe. The pistol has three capabilities: a standard fire mode, the ability to create force fields to block enemy fire, and a powerful charged shot that can break through force fields and some walls. Enemies also have the same capabilities, requiring the player to take advantage of the three gun modes and the environment to overcome them.
Lester and his alien ally cannot sustain any damage, and the game ends immediately if either of them is struck by a projectile or comes in contact with an animal or an environmental hazard. during a thunderstorm and goes to work on his experiment using a particle accelerator, attempting to reconstruct what happened when the universe was born. Immediately before the particles reach their intended destination, a lightning bolt strikes the laboratory and interferes with the accelerator, causing an unforeseen particle fusion and an explosion, opening a hole in time and space and teleporting Lester to a barren, alien planet. The game's art style and atmosphere also drew influence from science fiction or fantasy art, including artists such as Frank Frazetta, Bernie Wrightson, and Zdzisław Beksiński, as well as the novel Hyperion. The laser blasters were also influenced by Star Wars. He was able to take advantage of the Amiga's genlock capabilities to create rotoscoped animations with the polygons, using video recordings of himself performing various actions. Though he had tried to use smaller polygons (which Chahi called "pixigons") to construct the backgrounds for the scenes based on Deluxe Paint artwork, the process of creating them was excruciatingly slow, and he returned to using bitmapped images.