[skillya_glowi]

I kind of agree with you there. I've never played Stranger's Wrath, and so my judgment may be (or will be, actually) a bit impaired, but I've seen quite a bit of the game and I know what it's about...I'm certainly not saying it's a bad game or bad plotline or bad anything. But everything that I see related to it is just missing the feeling of Oddworld that I've gotten so used to (and grown to love) in the first two, to a stretch three, games.

Partly I think this is because Lorne did a complete 180 on his statement that he made during the Oddworld Quintology era --- that the stories he wanted to tell with these games were about the "little guys" who seemingly didn't matter but rose above themselves, to use a sickening cliche, and changed circumstances that they would have never even dreamed themselves capable to affect. Basically, they were stories about how much an ordinary person (or, in the case of Munch, a sub-ordinary or disadvantaged person) could do with determination. Stranger just doesn't seem like that at all --- physically powerful and with an exciting lifestyle, and so on, and so forth...it just doesn't seem like an Oddworld sort of story.

Also, as we all know, a huge factor in establishing a game's atmosphere is just the design. As much as I hate to say this (yet I've said this before) --- Raymond Swanland, although he is an incredible artist, just wasn't born to be a designer. At least not a designer for Oddworld. His work, which was strongly based off things that come from our universe, just couldn't connect with the kind of completely new, original, alternative reality feel established by Olds and Farzad. The way the characters in the game were designed just don't feel natural to me, I guess, and this makes them less believable.

Anyway, that's as much as I can say without actually having played the game.