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There’s a part of Lorne Lanning that thinks his biggest success, the Oddworld series, is a bit of a fluke.

His first video game, Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee, tells the story of a slave named Abe who rose up against his captors. The action-platformer was a massive hit, selling millions of copies when it was released in 1997. The title still stands apart, even all these years later, for its exploration of empathy as a substitute for violence. To this day, Lanning still feels like someone who was just in the right place at the right time.

“The release date for Doom 2 slipped,” Lanning says, referring to the classic first-person shooter missing an intended release date during the holidays that year. “Unreal slipped. Duke Nukem slipped. Some others slipped as well. So we were the only Christmas hit.”

Not until years later, as the sales of the franchise’s back catalog began to pile up on digital distribution platforms like Steam, did he really begin come to terms with the impact that his franchise had on its fans.

It was the tattoos that surprised him most.

“This one time, while I was at EGX in England, I met some big-ass dudes,” Lanning says, leaning back on a sofa in a hotel room near Chicago’s O’Hare airport last month. “These two big guys, they look like a hooligans. And the one guy’s looking at me, and then he lifts up the sleeve over this giant arm ... and it’s Abe.”

Abe, the green-skinned, oppressed Mudokon turned revolutionary — the character Lanning himself created, and gave voice to, more than 20 years ago.

“They were like, ‘You don’t understand man. Our childhood kind of sucked. And together we got through a lot of shit with Abe,’” Lanning recalls. “And I was like, wow. [...] It just seems so unlikely, but it just captured a little bit of that feeling that the empathy in our game was working. And that it meant something deeper to them.”

Now, more than two decades after that first title came out, Lanning is ready to go back and make its sequel over again. Oddworld: Soulstorm is his chance to do his most famous character justice. With luck, it will secure him and his team the momentum they need to complete the next three titles, to finish a “quintology” that’s been on the drawing board since the 1990s.

Polygon was invited to view a pre-recorded demonstration of an early version of Soulstorm. Selections from that early gameplay were used to create the first teaser trailer, which was released on YouTube today.

Compared to 2014’s Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty! — a remake of the 1997 original — the difference is night and day. The resolutions in each scene are higher quality, of course, and the animations are more elaborate. But the structure of the game is completely different.

In this new interpretation of the Oddworld universe, Lanning and his team have incorporated a style that they’ve dubbed “2.9D.” The assets — the characters and the obstacles that they encounter — are fully three-dimensional. But the bulk of the action takes place on the two-dimensional plane. In motion, the game looks like a modern platformer. Until it doesn’t.

At certain times in the level that I was shown, Abe and the game’s other characters turn a corner, stepping into the frame. That’s when the camera turns with them to view the world from a perpendicular angle. The mechanic gives the game the same sort of dimensionality as the puzzle game Fez, which asked players to traverse a series of cube-like worlds. But Soulstorm goes a step further, layering the multiple parts of each game level atop one another.

Whereas traditional platformers like Super Mario Bros. always ask characters to move from left to right, slowly revealing more of the game world as though unrolling a sheet of wrapping paper, environments in Soulstorm have unprecedented depth. The television screen or the monitor becomes a window, and through it players can almost make out the objective in the distance. It’s up to them to find a way to get there.

Lanning says he expects a total of 20 levels to ship with the final game.

Soulstorm will pick up just after the end of the original Abe’s Oddysee. Its opening level will feature Abe and the 300 allies he saved in the previous game. Disaster strikes, in the form of a raging inferno, and it’s up to the protagonist to lead his followers to safety.

Just like in previous titles in the series, protecting those starting followers will be the key to victory, and gaining even more followers over time will play a role in leveling up Abe’s abilities. But those followers will play a more active role than ever before. Lanning explains that Soulstorm’s Mudokons will be able to do just about everything that Abe can do. They’re faster and more agile.

“They can become fighting allies,” Lanning says. “It’s more like you’re developing a gang, a mob that you can then position around like a tower defense game.”

That, plus a new inventory and crafting system, will allow players to set up elaborate ambushes for the game’s enemies. In motion, it looks a bit like the classic game Lemmings, if all the rodents were armed to the teeth.

Lanning says that the early part of the game will revolve around a scavenger’s economy. Only by picking up garbage — recyclable items like bottle and cans — can Abe begin to earn currency. With cash on hand, the rebellious Mudokons will then use vending machines to purchase items and equipment. Once crafted together with other items found in the world, the result is a set of tools and weapons inspired by the The Anarchist Cookbook.

But the game’s followers are more than just guerrilla fighters. They’re also spiritual beings. Abe, in his own way, is their spiritual leader.

“Before, the Mudokons you saved were beasts of burden,” Lanning says. “But now they’re power-ups in a chi-like, spiritual way. Because the more followers you have the more faith is in you.”

Just as in previous iterations of the Oddworld universe, Abe has the ability to possess other creatures. In Soulstorm, Abe will never carry a gun. He will, however, be able to possess other characters that carry guns. And that’s not all.

“You create an orb by chanting,” Lanning says, dipping for a moment into the nasally falsetto he created for Abe. He sounds like a hamster deep in meditation. “You’re able to fly that orb around and then attach it to other characters. That orb itself can get layered with other cosmic abilities, more spiritual abilities, but you’ll earn those through a different chemistry, which we call chi-charms.”

Just what exactly those chi-charms will do has yet to be revealed, but they will form the game’s secondary economy. Combined with the makeshift weapons, Soulstorm will have more in common with modern role-playing games than any other game in the franchise’s history.

Soulstorm will also have multiple endings.

“We’re not creating 50 different trees of possibility,” Lanning admits. But the game will play out very differently depending on how many Mudokons Abe is able to save. That, along with the collectible nature of the game’s power-ups, should extend the potential playtime beyond 12 to 15 hours to experiences closer to 100 hours or more.

Long-time fans will be delighted to know that Lanning is staying true to the game’s classic sense of humor, but they should also expect Soulstorm to have themes that are darker and heavier than ever before. At the center is the story of the mysterious beverage being made by and for the denizens in the Oddworld universe, something called “the Brew.”

“The story is darker,” Lanning says. “It’s not more gratuitous. That’s not something we ever really wanted. It’s not like we’re saying like, ‘Yeah, we’re pulling out hearts this time.’ No. We were never a part of that.

“But the trip of what is the Brew? What is it really about? What does it do? It’s pretty dark stuff. And what is Abe’s plight? What has happened in the history of Oddworld? It’s pretty heavy shit. I’m sure we’ll have tears in this game from our players.”

Oddworld: Soulstorm is slated for release some time in 2020. Final platforms have not yet been announced.