I'm gonna have to go ahead and cast my vote for Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee. I enjoyed New n Tasty and it's a good game game standalone of it's previous incarnation, hell I was even the guy who trawled through the game multiple times looking for the "two secret characters", however when compared to Abe's Oddysee it just fell kinda flat for me (Despite it being 3D).
When playing on the hardest difficulty and attempting a 100% saviour status - which I'm sure I wasn't the only person to do on their first playthrough - I found many issues with the gameplay. Both AO and NnT are action/puzzle games, but Abe's Oddysee had puzzles based around it's grid system, whereas New n Tasty just had puzzles based around Abe's Oddysee sans grid.
The grid system works for the puzzles we're presented with in the same way it works for a puzzle game like Bejeweled, it allows us to plan our actions and easily interpret the moves we make. I'm sure others here when playing AO/AE think in the sense of "Right, if I run for 3 squares, jump, then quickly tuck into a roll I can get past that meat saw." However this kind of forethought and planning was made incredibly difficult with the exclusion of the grid system, as it was the backbone from which all the game's challenges were made easily understandable.
When I die on the originals I know that it's my fault, I mistimed a jump, or I should've waited a second longer before running from that Scrab. But with New n Tasty none of my deaths seemed like they were as much my fault as they were failing mechanics. The meat saws on the hardest difficulty were far too fast to the point where you'd have to spam quiksave and quikload just to find the 10 millisecond long span of time where you'd manage to succesfully roll through. And that shouldn't be the case in a puzzle game, it slows the flow and reduces a player's desire to continue out of sheer frustration.
My deaths in AO/AE felt fair, my deaths in NnT did not.
Extra Credits did a great episode on this concept that I recommend watching.
This is why I'm excited for Soulstorm being loosely based off of Abe's Exoddus, it opens up what they're able to do mechanically without restraining any new or absent mechanics to the confines of its orginal version. OWI seem to have taken NnT as a learning experience and that makes me very excited for what they do next.
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