There is no game quite like Another World, and there’s a simple reason for that: almost nobody else built an entire game the way Eric Chahi built this one. One person, working largely alone, produced a cinematic action-platformer in 1991 that plays more like an interactive film than a traditional game — no score counter, no lives displayed, no HUD whatsoever. Just you, an alien world, and the will to survive.
Made Almost Entirely by One Person
Another World, known as Out of This World in North America, was developed by Eric Chahi and published by Delphine Software in 1991. The story begins with physicist Lester Knight Chaykin accidentally transported to an alien planet after a particle accelerator accident. He wakes in a cage alongside an alien prisoner, and what follows is a wordless journey of survival, trust, and escape told entirely through animation and gameplay — no dialogue boxes, no exposition dumps, nothing but what you can see happening on screen.
Chahi handled design, animation, and programming largely on his own over roughly two years of development, which was already unusual for a commercially released game in 1991 and helps explain why the final product feels so unusually singular in vision — there was no committee smoothing out the stranger creative choices, just one person’s specific sense of pacing and atmosphere carried through from the first frame to the last.
No HUD, No Score, No Mercy
The game has no traditional checkpoints — death returns you to the beginning of each sequence, and deaths are frequent, often spectacular, and occasionally darkly funny. Learning the correct approach to each situation is the game’s entire core loop; there’s very little inventory or inventory management to fall back on, just Lester, the environment, and whatever’s trying to kill him in that moment.
Rotoscoped Polygons and a Weapon That Does Everything
Another World uses rotoscoped polygon animation, a technique similar in spirit to Prince of Persia but rendered as colored polygons rather than sprite sheets, giving it a distinctive visual style that looks unlike any other DOS game from the period. Gameplay steadily alternates between tense platforming sections requiring precise timing and combat sequences where Lester uses a single versatile energy weapon to create shields, charge shots, and basic laser fire — one tool, reused in escalating and creative ways rather than a growing arsenal.
Why Dying So Often Doesn’t Feel Cheap (Mostly)
The trial-and-error structure works because each sequence is short and the solution is almost always readable once you understand what the game is asking of you — a specific timing window, a specific use of the energy weapon’s shield mode, a specific direction to run. My honest criticism: a handful of sequences lean on reflexes tuned for a joystick and 1991 monitor lag, and on modern hardware a couple of timing-based deaths will feel unfair the first time you hit them, before you’ve learned the pattern. Once you have, though, it clicks, and the sense of relief the first time a sequence finally goes right is unlike almost anything else from the era. The trade-off is deliberate: Chahi wanted tension and consequence in every screen transition, and a more forgiving checkpoint system would have undercut the constant, low-grade dread that makes the alien world feel genuinely dangerous rather than just decorative. It’s a design choice modern players tend to either love immediately or bounce off entirely.
Another World Next to Prince of Persia and Flashback
Set beside Prince of Persia, which used traditional rotoscoped sprite animation for similarly fluid movement, Another World pushes further into pure cinematic minimalism — no palace, no time limit ticking down, just an alien world revealing itself scene by scene. Next to Flashback, which arrived two years later and clearly inherited some of Chahi’s approach to atmospheric, dialogue-light storytelling, Another World is the rawer, more experimental of the two, with rougher edges that Flashback smoothed out. Both games trace back to the same French development scene that treated cinematic presentation as seriously as mechanics, a sensibility that was much rarer in American and Japanese output of the same period.
Setting Up DOSBox
Check our DOSBox guide for setup basics, then run ANOTHER.EXE once you’ve mounted the game folder.
A Legacy Bigger Than the Game Itself
Another World was decades ahead of its time. The cinematic approach to storytelling through gameplay rather than cutscenes anticipated techniques that modern games still use, and the alien environment communicates danger and wonder without a single word of dialogue. It’s one of the most emotionally affecting DOS games ever made, and one of the most influential — you can trace a fairly direct line from Chahi’s minimalist storytelling to games made thirty years later, from wordless indie darlings to the environmental storytelling techniques big-budget studios now treat as standard practice. Few one-person passion projects from any era can claim that kind of reach, and fewer still hold up as genuinely playable rather than merely historically important. Another World manages both at once, which is the rarer and harder achievement of the two, and it’s why the game keeps getting re-released and remastered rather than just written about in retrospectives, most recently in official anniversary editions that carry the original creative vision faithfully through to current modern hardware without softening any of its harder, stranger edges along the way in that whole process.
Watch Gameplay
You might also like:
