Oozi: Earth Adventure is the 3rd game I ever bought on Steam.

Made by Polish indie devs Awesome Games Studio, Oozi is about a cheerful alien who comes to Earth only to discover that all our local creatures are hazardous to his health.

At the time I bought this, I was tired of FPS games and the “gritty” and “realistic” that entailed. I wanted something fantastic and colourful. And what better way to experience that than with a platformer?

Now I didn’t want to go back to the well of my childhood. I had experienced enough Mario and Sonic to last a lifetime. Further, retro pixel art wasn’t on the menu – I wanted something that was obviously a modern PC game.

So Oozi came calling. It is indeed a 2D platformer. And while it’s not fancy by any means of the imagination, it’s obvious Oozi does stuff that an 8-bit and 16-bit console can’t do. Hell, it does things not even a PSOne could do.

There’s no polygons here. There’s no particle effects. But Oozi has nice smooth cartoon-like and hand-drawn animations that make it a joy. And it’s very apparent that this is purely about platforming.

What I particularly like about Oozi is that it’s simple enough for anyone to get started, but challenging for even the most practiced of platformer fans. Yes, it’s primarily about jumping from ledge-to-ledge, collecting points, and killing baddies. But you have to have a little bit of clever thinking to get you to the end of the stage.

Oozi is nothing like Mario or Sonic. The closest platformer I would compare it to is Rayman in terms of aesthetic and level design.

Now there is double jumping, wall jumping, and stomps. But there are no puzzles, one touch deaths or traps. This makes Oozi very suitable for casual pick up and play.

Because this is a 10-year-old game, it doesn’t demand much in the way of specs. You just need a 2Ghz CPU, 1GB RAM, and 200MB space. Integrated graphics will do. It was originally made for Windows, but I got it to work on Linux via Proton. Oozi works perfectly on my Steam Deck.

Originally, Oozi was released digitally for the Xbox 360 via Xbox Live Arcade. But Microsoft no longer supports Xbox 360, and Oozi isn’t for sale there. To date, the only way to play Oozi right now is on PC – it’s not available on modern consoles.

And this is a good time to remind everyone why I prefer PC gaming. Again, I bought this game almost a decade ago. It works not only on my tower but also on my Steam Deck. No tweaking required.

You can’t really do that with consoles. Sure, one upon a time, you could buy console games on disc. And if you kept your old console around or the next generation offered backwards compatibility, you could play the disc.

But now console gaming depends largely on digital-only downloads. So many of these digital-only games disappear either because the original developer doesn’t want to support it anymore, there’s an intellectual property dispute, or the storefront that sells the game gets shuttered.

Now I’m not saying these same risks don’t exist on PC. But they don’t exist to the same degree as on console. This is largely in part because games on PC don’t have the same planned obsolescence as they do on console.

That, right there, is why I’m glad I got Oozi on PC – because Oozi is a very good game, and I don’t want to stop playing it just because specific hardware or storefront is no longer supported.