Heart of the Alien

Heart of the Alien is a sequel to the legendary Another World and also one of the few games released exclusively for the Mega-CD. The key twist lies in the point of view: this time you don't control the human scientist Lester, but his alien companion Buddy, who carried the hero to safety in the first game. The story thus picks up exactly where the original left off and develops it from the other side, including a look at Buddy's own people and his standing among them.

The gameplay stays true to its predecessor. It's a cinematic platformer where a single wrong step means death and where you progress through trial and lesson learned. Buddy has no blaster; instead he uses a whip, which he uses to pull himself up, swing over chasms, and attack enemies. Action-heavy shootout situations alternate with sequences where you need to find the right sequence of steps, pull a lever, or run past a guard while he's looking away. The segments are short, the difficulty high, and frequent deaths are part of the design, so the game is driven more by memorization than reflexes. The whip itself controls with surprising precision, and the game wrings a whole range of different situations out of a single mechanic, from swinging over a chasm to yanking an opponent off a cliff.

Visually it follows the distinctive style of its predecessor: simple flat colors, sprawling backgrounds, and rotoscoped animation that gives the characters an unusual weight. The Mega-CD is used mainly for disc-based music and for longer, calmly paced cutscenes without a single line of dialogue. At the time the game met with some skepticism, since it was made by a different studio than the original and part of the audience didn't consider it an equal sequel. With hindsight, though, it's an interesting and honestly crafted coda to one of the most influential games of the nineties, one that deserves attention if only for how boldly it shifts perspective. For anyone who finished Another World and wanted to know what happened next, it's the only possible answer, and also one of the reasons collectors still hunt down the Mega-CD library today.