The game tells the story of Lester, a young scientist who, as a result of an experiment gone wrong, finds himself on a dangerous alien world where he is forced to fight for his survival.

The game was originally developed for the Amiga and Atari ST but has since been widely ported to other contemporary systems, including home and portable consoles and mobile devices.

It also influenced a number of other video games and designers, inspiring such titles as Ico, Metal Gear Solid, Silent Hill, and Delphine's later Flashback.

Another World is a platform game, featuring a control scheme where the player uses either the keyboard, joystick or gamepad to make the protagonist run, jump, attack and perform other, situation-specific actions, such as rocking a cage back and forth.

Lester and his alien ally cannot sustain any damage, and the game ends immediately if either of them is struck by a projectile or comes in contact with an animal or an environmental hazard.

In the opening cinematic, Lester arrives at his high-tech underground laboratory in his car[14] during a thunderstorm and goes to work on his experiment using a particle accelerator, attempting to reconstruct what happened when the universe was born.

It was the success of his earlier work with Paul Cuisset as a graphic designer for the adventure game Future Wars for Delphine Software and its royalties that gave him the chance to develop Another World "without any constraint of any sort or any editorial pressure."

The art and atmosphere were influenced by science fiction books such as Dune, artists such as Michael Whelan, and comic illustrators such as Richard Corben.

[17] In August 1989, Chahi was impressed by the flat-color animations that the Amiga version of Dragon's Lair had and thought that it would be possible to use vector outlines to create a similar effect using much less computer storage.

[18] He was able to take advantage of the Amiga's genlock capabilities to create rotoscoped animations with the polygons, using video recordings of himself performing various actions.

Though he had tried to use smaller polygons (which Chahi called "pixigons") to construct the backgrounds for the scenes based on Deluxe Paint artwork, the process of creating them was excruciatingly slow, and he returned to using bitmapped images.

However, with no idea of the technical limitations he would face while building out the story, he focused more on creating ambiance, rhythmic pacing, and narrative tension to the game.

[18][19] With the creation of the tools needed for building out the rest of the game by December 1989, Chahi began working on the introductory sequence as a means to validate the full capacities of his engine.

Several points in the game use elevators or teleporters to move Lester between levels; Chahi had used these instead of stairways, as it was difficult to produce proper animation for these.

He began to take steps to simplify the development, including reusing background graphics and creating building blocks that allowed him to focus more on the game's puzzles.

Chahi, working for 16 hours a day for two months, responded by creating a new level just before the amphitheatre scene, when the alien friend rescues Lester at the end of a long dead-end corridor.

The SNES, 3DO Interactive Multiplayer (3DO) and Apple IIGS ports each contain a prologue before the introduction begins, which consists of an entry that comes from Lester's diary.

Some new tunes were also added, all played from the disc, such as when Lester escapes the big pool in the first level and when he is grabbed by the guard that appears at the end.

Chahi saw that the game's playability could be improved, so he used his old Amiga for reprogramming certain parts of the script and made the graphics' shading clearer in order to counter mobile phones' low resolutions.

It was released as a limited collector's item in cartridge form, complete with a box and manual published by the association Retro-Gaming Connexion (RGC) in 2013.

This version is part of the Another World 15th Anniversary Edition CD-ROM released in 2007, which also includes a development diary, an exclusive postcard autographed by Chahi and a separate soundtrack CD.

[40] On September 22, 2011, BulkyPix released a special 20th anniversary edition for the iPhone/iPad, featuring a switch between the original and HD graphics, new intuitive touch controls or a classic D-pad, three difficulty modes and remastered sound effects.

According to Digital Lounge, the goal was to "simply to deliver the original experience of Another World faithfully, with the benefits of today's hardware and a high level of polish".

"[15] Reviewing the 15th Anniversary Edition in 2010, Eurogamer's John Walker called it "still utterly beautiful", adding that the game's art style is "just fantastic.

"[13] In a 2014 review of the 3DS version, Bob Mackey of USGamer opined "Another World is definitely an experience every gamer should have — and not just for the sake of checking out a historical curiosity.

"[79] In 2008, Tim Rogers named Another World "The best videogame of all time", describing it as "an Actual Genius's osmosed omniscience regarding game design.

"[80] In 2011, Wirtualna Polska ranked the "visionary" Another World as the 15th best game for the Amiga, remembering it for a cinematic feel and "uncommonly" high difficulty (for a first-time player) and calling it "one of the most important titles in the history of electronic entertainment.

The game's vivid vector graphics were utterly stunning at the time, and the pacing of the heavy, nicely animated platforming naturally melded with taking in the sights of the sublime alien landscape," and adding that "slowly adapting to the hostile surroundings offered a hard-earned satisfaction and a surprisingly moving story.

[89] Entertainment Weekly wrote: "More like being in a movie than playing a video game, this leisurely paced, noir-tinted adventure demands that you use your wits to find your way out of an eerie parallel universe.

Paul Cuisset's best-selling 1992 game Flashback, also released by Delphine but created without any involvement from Chahi, features similar gameplay and graphics and makes a few nods to Another World, including the use of personal force fields in combat, a nearly identical end text in the ending cutscene, and an almost exact motion recreation of the gun pickup cutscene.