Journey To The Savage Planet
PC, PS4, Xbox One
We’ve been unsure about 505 Games for a while, to be honest. The Italian publisher has a fine eye, no doubt, but after the deal has been signed its games have always seemed a little underpromoted. At E3 last year, Control was one of the big hits among the assembled press, but it was quietly tucked away in a meeting room upstairs; the eventual torrent of end-of-year awards that rained down on Remedy’s game had little to do with how much it was, or rather wasn’t, promoted. Yet the messaging around
Journey To The Savage Planet has been pitch perfect. When we first touch down in Typhoon Studios’ debut, we know exactly what to expect – and the game is all the better for it.
Quite how much of that is down to 505 is open to question, admittedly. After all, Typhoon co-founder and creative director Alex Hutchinson has spent the past couple of years detailing Savage Planet’s creation in these very pages in his column, Hold To Reset. Perhaps, therefore, we come to the game better informed about his intentions for the project than the wider gameplaying public. But out on the press circuit Hutchinson has been measured and consistent in explaining what the game both is, and isn’t, proving that game development isn’t just about what you make, but how you talk about it too.
Landing on a planet that looks like it’s been generated by the No Man’s Sky algorithm naturally invites a certain set of comparisons; likewise the knowledge that this game was directed by a developer who, at Ubisoft, was at the helm of Assassin’s Creed III and Far Cry 4. Savage Planet certainly bears those games’ hallmarks, but this is not a game built by procedural happenstance, nor is it an intimidatingly large and busy open world. This is just as Hutchinson promised: a modestly sized, handcrafted game that respects the player’s time and rewards their investment. Unlike so many of the games it will remind you of over its 12-hour runtime, it feels not so much built as it does designed.
Indeed, if there’s a comparison to be made, it’s to
Metroid Prime. One of your first tasks in the game is to use your visor’s scanner for your AI companion to identify and catalogue, and the theme continues throughout a game of gentle, gear-gated exploration, careful platforming and puzzling, and a healthy dose of gunplay. The latter is among the more undercooked elements: your pistol may be upgradeable but it’s the only weapon in your arsenal, handling is woolly and the negligible zoom of the aim-down-sight function is barely deserving of the term. Upgrades include bounce shots, a charged blast powered by an active-reload-style timing meter, and larger clip and reload times. But most of the game’s weaker moments happen when you’re shooting at – or around, in our experience – something that’s trying to kill you.
Happily, there’s plenty more than that on the menu. Dropped on planet AR-Y 26 and cast as an employee of Kindred Aerospace (proudly the fourth-best interstellar exploration company in the galaxy), your task is twofold: first, to do Kindred’s bidding and scan the planet for resources and signs of life; second, to find enough fuel to get yourself off this godforsaken rock and back home, since your ship was damaged on arrival. Doing so involves finding a number of tucked-away fuel sources. Find them all, and you can bring the game to a close immediately.
Hutchinson and Typhoon have made much of their desire for Journey To The Savage Planet to have that rarest of videogame qualities: an actual sense of humour. That ambition is made clear even before you get off the ship, the cheerily corporate-dystopian vibe of Kindred and your AI accomplice rattling off the gags from minute one, and most of them landing well. The biggest laughs come from video messages sent to you by Kindred’s president and CEO Martin Tweed, and from a series of live-action commercials that unlock as you progress through the game and play when you return to your ship (one of which has bestowed unto us the immortal phrase ‘nose broth’). If there’s a style here, it’s Borderlands, if Borderlands were as funny as it thinks it is. It’s a treat.
If there’s a style here, it’s Borderlands, if Borderlands were as funny as it thinks it is. It’s a treat
Typhoon doesn’t want the fun to stop with the script, however. Animations, enemy designs and sound effects all do their bit to keep the tone as light as possible, and even many of the game’s mechanics are played firmly for laughs. Your melee attack is a hefty boot that sends smaller enemies flying; the charged version is a slap that makes them explode. The Gelatinous Blob, one of many throwable items, turns into a jump pad when it lands, and you suspect the only reason Typhoon put it in the game was for the bulbous ‘sproing’ it emits as it launches you skywards.
The first thing you do in the game is use a disgusting food substitute, Grob, to kite around a small group of pufferbirds, an initially passive enemy type found throughout the game. Shortly after feeding on the gloopy substance, they’ll poop out carbon, an essential crafting material. You’ll throw down some more, taking advantage of the bottomless Grob barrel nearby, with the same results. You carry on for a while, getting the hint. But then you get it wrong: perhaps your aim fails you, or a pufferbird wanders in front of you as you press the button to throw. Instead of hitting the floor, the Grob hits the creature. Its cutesy, friendly little pals – at least 50 per cent eyeball, as the game’s in-menu bestiary acknowledges – set about it eagerly, eating it alive. It explodes in a shower of carbon and lurid green goo. It was, we assure you, entirely accidental. The first time, anyway.
Indeed, we find ourselves back there in the late game when, short of carbon for an essential upgrade, we’re in need of an endless, and endlessly icky, source of the stuff. This is, however, a rare occurrence. Given Hutchinson’s Ubisoft past, the sight of Journey To The Savage Planet’s upgrade menus, accessed through a 3D printer on your ship, rather sets the teeth on edge. Yet this is a gag in itself: most of the available unlocks and improvements are acquired naturally through the course of the game, meaning the menus are just an oddly intimidating visual representation of the planet’s geargating. You’ll unlock a new toy when the game needs you to, not a moment before – at which point, as is tradition, you’ll remember all the unreachable places you passed earlier which your new tool can access.
Said upgrades are nothing out of the ordinary – a double jump, a grapple hook, a ground pound, a railgrind – and it’s not a toolset you’re meant to use creatively, more a grab-bag of specific tools for individual jobs. Hence the sense of a designed world. This is not a place where improvisation wins the day, rather one where every enemy, chasm or sheer wall has a defined solution, where if it feels like you can’t get somewhere yet, you definitely can’t. That’s not to say there’s no scope for exploration: heading off the beaten track might net you a health upgrade, a stash of minerals, or a good laugh. A suite of nonessential, but thoroughly enjoyable upgrades are locked behind a shopping list of tasks, dubbed Field Research, that insist you go off and muck about for a spell (killing enemies while they’re airborne after a boot to the face; catching a large group in the blast radius of an explosive pufferbird). In any case, the game’s linearity is no negative. It gives proceedings the sort of forward momentum and focus that is all too rare in this longitudinal age, particularly among the kinds of game that share Savage Planet’s aesthetic.
The result is a game that is never at risk of outstaying its welcome, though it can certainly test the patience in places. The aforementioned gunplay is a frequent culprit. Some foes can be hard to pick out against the busy, colourful scenery; controller users will curse their lack of turning speed when fighting the more flighty enemy variants; and we get hit by one creature’s charge attack we were convinced we’d dodged more times than we’d care to remember, much less admit. The final third of the game is perhaps a little too exacting, both in terms of the precision required to complete the tasks at hand and the number of enemies Typhoon throws at you along the way. That turns out to be appropriate training for an infuriating last boss – if only we’d got that explosive upgrade through Field Research. The payoff that follows the eventual kill elicits just enough of a belly-laugh to save the game ending on a downer.
Yet even when we’re cursing Journey To The Savage Planet, we still enjoy it. This is a generous game in both deed and spirit, and, as such, one it’s tremendously difficult to dislike. It’s a curious proposition, even a risky one, to try and make a comedy game. After all, what makes a bunch of game devs think they can be funny? We’ve met a fair few over the years, and the odds seem stacked against them. Typhoon has cracked it at the first time of asking.