Bottom Line: Just Add Water rebuilt Abe's Oddysee so carefully that its satire of industrial greed lands as hard as it did in 1997, and the new quicksave finally makes the game fair. Its trial-and-error design and fussy GameSpeak still punish impatient players, and on phones the touch controls are cramped enough that you'll want a controller.
The Gameplay Loop: Observe, Die, Understand, Execute
New 'n' Tasty! isn't an action game. It's a sequence of lethal logic puzzles dressed up as an action game. Abe has no attack. He can run, sneak, jump, pull levers, throw grenades and rocks, and talk. Every room is a small deterministic machine made of patrolling Sligs, sleeping Slogs, mines, trapdoors and meat saws. Your job is to work out its timing.
The loop is simple and unforgiving. You go in, you watch, and you almost certainly die. Then you understand the room and try again. When it works, a precise run past three guards with two Mudokons in tow is as satisfying as anything in the genre. When it doesn't, you're repeating a 40-second setup to retry a two-second jump.
Quicksave changes that. In the original, a mistake late in a long puzzle chain sent you back to a distant checkpoint, and you had to replay everything you'd already solved. In the remake, you save once you've solved a section and practice only the part that's giving you trouble. Purists will call that softening. I call it respect for the player's time. The puzzle design is intact. The busywork between attempts is gone.
The fix isn't complete, though. Automatic checkpoint placement is still uneven. Some sections checkpoint generously, while others drop you back past several screens of solved material if you haven't saved manually. The game expects you to build a quicksave habit and never really teaches it. Many of the frustration complaints you'll find in user reviews come from players who never built that habit.
GameSpeak: Brilliant Idea, Clumsy Interface
GameSpeak is still the series' boldest idea. Rescuing Mudokons isn't a matter of touching them. You talk to them. You say "Hello," then "Follow me," then "Wait," and you lead a nervous line of workers past guards and into a bird portal. Some Mudokons are depressed, some are angry, and some have been drugged into giggling, so the language has social layers. It's a conversation system as a puzzle mechanic, and in 1997 it was years ahead of its time.
The weakness is the input. The commands are mapped to shoulder buttons and modifiers, and when you're under pressure it's easy to issue the wrong one. A mistimed "Wait" instead of "Follow me" can get an entire escort killed. The remake lets you address groups of Mudokons at once, which makes the bigger rescues manageable. Commands still have no margin for error, though, and moving Mudokons around the space can feel fiddly. It's the most common specific complaint, and it's fair.
Possession: Power With a Price
Chanting to possess a Slig is the game's power fantasy. You take over the guard, walk him down the corridor and shoot his colleagues, then detonate his body when you're done. It's darkly funny. It also puts a verb into a game that otherwise has none. But chanting leaves Abe exposed, some zones block it, and possessed Sligs can't do everything. The game hands you power only on its own terms, and that keeps possession from breaking the stealth design.
Moral Weight and the Two Endings
This is where New 'n' Tasty! stands out from most platformers. The rescue count is the story. Save enough Mudokons and Abe becomes a liberator. Abandon them and the game remembers that too. It's a binary ending system, and in 2026 it can feel blunt. Still, it gives the collection mechanic a meaning that "collect all 100 coins" never had. Leaving a worker behind because the escort was too hard feels bad, and it's meant to.
Controls: Modern vs. Classic
The modern analog scheme makes Abe feel more like a contemporary platformer character, with fluid acceleration and freer movement. The classic scheme snaps him back to the original's grid logic, with measured steps and exact jump distances. That debate still divides fans. Some prefer the original's pacing and precision. For a first playthrough, I'd recommend classic controls. The puzzles were designed around discrete movement, and analog input sometimes adds slop to jumps that demand exact placement. Offering both is the right call. Leaving the choice to the player without explaining the trade-off isn't.
Co-op
The local co-op mode lets two players share the adventure by passing control back and forth. It's a nice way to play with someone on the couch. It's not a co-op game in the modern sense, and it shouldn't factor into your purchase decision.