Planet of Lana gleefully picks up the torch from the likes of Inside and Little Nightmares, offering a weightier and more realistic feel to its jump ‘n’ run action. With gorgeously rendered vistas and absolutely superb sound design (we definitely recommend you wear headphones playing this game) it’s an absorbing adventure that offers an accessible challenge without outstaying its welcome.
A spectacular sense of scale draws you into the action, with enormous robots [1] dwarfing protagonist Lana’s village in the snappy opening section. The stealth gameplay immediately recalls the likes of Limbo or Deadlight, with a simple control scheme that’s well-explained and easy to pick up. The major wrinkle here is the addition of companion character Mui [2], who upon joining the proceedings immediately transforms the game into something akin to Oddworlds: Abe’s Oddysee, with Lana commanding the little furry chap around the screen to assist in solving various environmental puzzles. The absolutely outstanding score from The Last Guardian composer Takeshi Furukawa elevates the rather familiar gameplay loop into something quite special.
BEEN THERE, DONE THAT
It’s the aforementioned familiarity that knocks Planet of Lana down a peg. You see, as polished and playable as the game is, you’re really not doing much here that you haven’t done in almost every other game of its genre. Luring creatures towards you [3] then belting away from them, pushing around and otherwise manipulating boxes, sneaking between spots of tall grass to avoid detection on pain of instant death… so far, so Little Nightmares, so Limbo, so Oddworld. But there’s absolutely nothing wrong with following in the footsteps of other games if the execution is there and, to be fair, in Planet of Lana it mostly is.
Games like this one are inherently quite reliant on one-hit kills, given their portrayal of more realistic, fragile player characters. Unfortunately, dying in one hit can often mean the dreaded spectre of trial and error, and that’s a ghost that haunts some of the set pieces – one section early in the game saw me sneak tentatively into an area that it turned out was only possible to survive if I enter it running full pelt. Having just come from a series of stealth sections, how could I have predicted that?
Still, such issues are very, very few and far between here. What’s left is a marvellously playable and involving platform puzzler with a focus on the interplay between the characters of Lana and Mui.
It isn’t the longest game (it took me roughly five hours to complete), but unless you’re completely burned out on the tropes of its genre, you’ll have a good time with Planet of Lana.
