[megameter]

I suspect that it's not really the case that Another World set out to emulate PoP given that the development of Another World started before PoP's Apple II release(which, if you have read Mechner's writings, was not a huge success until ports came out the next year with a little marketing push).

The games that Another World is drawing on are actually the European action-adventures of the later 80's - the run of games Psygnosis had with Brataccas, Shadow of the Beast and Barbarian were very influential and suggested various ways of thinking about side-view platforming that would influence a "cinematic" approach - Barbarian, for example, really pushes on the idea of having every screen be a self-contained puzzle with major scripted elements. The concept was never entirely new, so much as it was elaborated on from classic arcade game "stages" and transposed from text adventures into graphical ones, at first in a crude sense with lock-and-key puzzles and then gradually with more emphasis on bespoke interactions, animations and environments as the platforms and game engines became more capable. Another World simply took the time to give everything some direction and continuity instead of accepting the status quo on the Amiga of "screenshot games" that looked good on the box but used janky control schemes and filler content.

Mechner, in contrast, was going off the influence of games from his immediate peers like Lode Runner and flirted with the idea of making it more of a construction-kit experience several times through development, before finally settling on a series of set-piece levels. This really shows up in the extremely modular nature of the level design: there are only a few one-off scripted elements, the bulk of the experience is rearrangements of platforms, gate-and-switch puzzles, traps and guards. While his implementation still pushed the limits of the Apple II, this was mostly because it attempted large sprites with detailed animation and minimal pausing for disk loads. A version of PoP with Lode Runner spritework is both easy to imagine and to make fit comfortably on 8-but hardware.