Like like many hundreds of other video games, Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath is a shooter set on a planet populated by gooey aliens. It contains good aliens and bad aliens and countless messy exchanges of high-energy weapons fire. If right now you are muttering to yourself that you know what's coming and you're not interested, hang on. For despite its premise, there is not a whisper of cliché about Stranger's Wrath. This is a sharp, clever, endlessly surprising game, one that combines a sweetly polished play experience with a razor wit and a steady supply of gross-out jokes. It is great to look at and marvelous under the thumbs. It works hard for your attention and your affections. At every opportunity it takes the path less traveled.

Stranger's Wrath is the latest from a development company called Oddworld Inhabitants. Like its predecessors its vibe is pitch-perfect, swinging from grinding bleakness to effervescent charm and back, and often managing to pull off both at the same time. All the Oddworld games take place in a sort of allegorical fantasyland, with big-eyed muppety aliens standing in for people, cracking wise and looking on the sunny side in the middle of cringe-inducing indignities and unspeakable horrors.

Oddworld is where laissez-faire capitalism goes to put a gun in its own mouth. It is squalid and polluted. It is badly under-policed. It is home to enormous corporations that employ slaves (both as labour and ingredients) to produce idiotic consumer products no one wants. Our heroes are usually underdogs. Abe was a poor factory worker whose lips had been stitched shut. Munch was a one-legged amphibian whose species had been hunted to extinction. And in the new game, the Stranger is a reluctant tough guy doing a hateful job because he's got no other way to pay his medical bills.

The Stranger is a bounty hunter, and his part of Oddworld looks a lot like the Wild West. He wears a wide-brimmed hat and speaks in a Clint Eastwood growl. But because this is Oddworld, and because Oddworld is cheerfully gruesome as a rule, the Stranger does not carry a gun. Instead he has a crossbow, which uses live animals for ammunition.

The action is a smooth mix of platformy jumping and first-person shooting. As the Stranger, we run through caverns and buildings, across bridges and down tunnels. We jump up onto ledges. We climb ropes. We smash boxes open in search of valuables. When bad guys approach, we can headbutt them or we can spin around in a fury of fists like Crash Bandicoot, or we can jump into the reeds and hide. Then with a click of a joystick, our perspective changes to first-person. We see the crossbow held in front of us, stocked with two kinds of sweet little creatures, and we can aim and fire across great distances.

We are hunting for money, and live bad guys yield bigger bounties than dead ones, so we usually shoot to stun. Once we have an enemy down, we suck him into a sort of space vacuum cleaner, where he cannot bother anyone and where he will stay until we can get him to the authorities and collect our reward.

Some of the little ammo-critters look like skunks, which detonate into clounds of noxious gas that leave our enemies helpless and retching. Some of them are bait, which attract the bad guys into corners so we can drop rocks on their heads. Some ensnare the villains in webs. Some are ravenous balls of spikes. Some are electric bugs. As we wander the landscape, we must be on the lookout for anything cute and furry, so that we can stun it and load it into our weapons bag. It sounds like a joke, and it is, but it is also unsettling in a way that never quite loses its edge. Oddworld is like that: brimming with gags, bursting with uncomfortable moments. It is a sophisticated and ambiguous place.

Also, it has talking chickens.