Sligs: It's An Odd World After All

With a name like Oddworld, you expect a weird game.  The Oddworld series definitely delivered the strangeness, and in a very good way.  The games had creepy locations and an even creepier population.  I still remember my "what the hell" moment seeing the animated Abe head for the first time on the title screen of Abe's Oddysee.  Today though we're going to overlook Abe and talk about the Oddworld games' iconic enemies: the Sligs.

Straight from the demented mind of Lorne Lanning

Sligs are to Abe what Goombas are to Mario.  However Mario never had to deal with fast-moving Goombas with machine guns who could pick him off from a distance.  Sligs are basically used as security personal throughout Oddworld, tasked with fending off intruders (I'm looking at you Abe) and keeping Mudokon slaves in line, which usually means beating them for no reason.  They are brutal, merciless, rude, and lazy, often sleeping and smoking on the job.

Appearance-wise, these upstanding citizens make you wonder what's going on inside Lorne Lanning's head; they look to be something out of your worst nightmare.  Tentacles either cover or extend from their mouths (we'll never know for sure since they always wear a gas-mask), making Sligs look like they are swallowing a giant green spider.  They also have no natural legs.  Their bodies end at the bottom of their spine, forcing them to crawl around using their arms unless they are fitted with prosthetic legs.

Slig without robo-pants

Sligs come in a few variants.  There's the standard foot soldier Slig (the first picture of the article), the flying Slig who uses a helicopter-style prosthetic that Dr. Robotnik would be proud of:

And then there's the Big-Bro Slig.  This is a Slig who has been beefed up using massive amounts of steroids, making him so large that he needs a heavy duty four-legged prosthetic in order to move around.

Of course Sligs are just one type of creature in the Oddworld games, there are many other nightmarish creations to talk about, but that's a story for another day!  Hopefully this brought back some memories of sneaking around Rupture Farms, hiding from these mean green machines!