When he sprints, he drops to all fours and scampers like a cat while his hunting, no less feline in its focus, is done by ensnaring small critters and then pelting them, courtesy of his crossbow, at the enemy-lending new meaning to the term “live ammunition.” Stranger would have been a fine fixture in Dutch van der Linde’s gang only, as he points out early on, he “never liked guns.” (Quite why I don’t know does he consider launching living creatures any more moral than metal bullets?) The landscape he prowls is dry and dust-whipped: a warped spin on the Old West. Stranger is a bounty hunter, going about his work on Oddworld-the unbounteous planet that has played host to the series since its inception, with Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee, in 1997. The game first released on the Xbox, in 2005, a time for video games that now seems as sun-dappled and distant as Super-8 footage of the seventies. This last week, spent in the company of Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath HD (which first released on the PS3, in 2011, and on the Vita in 2012), I have found myself swerving between both moods-just as the game’s hero, Stranger, flits between first-person shooting and third-person platforming.

Whether you glance at it leisurely, as you might on a long Sunday drive, or you shoot it pained, desperate looks, the way you would if you were trying to shake a nasty tail, depends on what you’re playing. With a stream of rereleases rushing through it, the Nintendo Switch’s screen can feel like a rearview mirror.

Oddworld stranger&#39;s wrath switch

Oddworld stranger's wrath switch