I love platformers and I'm usually rather good at them. Still, I got frustrated with Abe's Odyssey up to the point that I had to stop playing it because of the messy controls. You often have to react fast at exactly the right moment to avoid death, but this is quite tricky even when you have good reflexes because you don't have pixel-by-pixel control over your character. Instead, when you jump while running, for instance, you have to wait until the horizontal movement animation takes your character a fixed amount in the desired direction, which introduces a small delay that's big enough for you to miss the moment when you had to jump. If you try to compensate for this by timing your jump earlier, then you will often be too early. Then, when you die, you have to wait for quite a while until the death and respawn animations have finished and you can try again. Probably gamers back in the days had more patience with this sort of thing, but today it seems rather annoying, at least to me. I love challenging platformers, but for me this was more frustration than challenge. The controls unfortunately totally broke the game for me, which I otherwise probably would have liked: The graphics are charming, there is a nice sense of humor, and if it weren't for the controls, the tricky levels would be an interesting challenge.
