JOURNE TO THE SAVAGE PLANET
A further cry.
Don’t stop believin’.
It looks like No Man’s Sky and it’s made by Far Cry 4 director Alex Hutchinson, so perhaps it’s best to start with which games Journey to the Savage Planet is not like. Although you and a co-op partner find yourself on a distant planet, it isn’t anything like as non-linear or as vast as No Man’s Sky. And sure, there’s a gun occupying the bottom-right of the screen, but Far Cry in space it is not. What Typhoon Studios has made with its debut title is something else entirely.
Something that gives you a real sense of being stranded in a huge and uncharted alien environment, but carefully curates your path through it. That path takes you through platforming sequences, boss battles, mob fights, and environmental puzzles, and often calls upon you to double back and use a new bit of kit in an old area to access previously out of reach places. It does all this while regularly making me laugh along with its story beats, and making me care about its central mystery: if the planet’s supposedly bereft of intelligent life, what’s that enormous tower doing right in the middle of it?
It’s a comedy-Metroidvania-survivalshooter-platformer, then. As a Kindred Aerospace employee shot out into the farthest reaches of who-knows-where to chart the planet and see if there’s anything worth the company’s time, you find yourself in a pickle when – stop me if you’ve heard this one – your spacecraft’s damaged during landing. A voyage of discovery’s required to survive and source the parts needed to fuel your journey back home. A simplistic enough setup, but it has real life breathed into it by the outright silliness of JTTSP’s writing, including live action commercial spoofs and memorable Facetimes with your CEO. Humour’s famously subjective, but even the behaviour of the loading bar on the vessel computer got me. Really. A funny loading bar.
The game might even be hoisted on its own petard here, because when it’s played in co-op, it’s easy to let your Discord bantz drown out the jokes, or to race ahead without stopping to appreciate the details. In fact, this may actually work better as a solo game allround, where you only need worry about one person being lost instead of two.
It’s an interesting mix of aggressive wildlife, cutesy fauna, and joyously weird scenery that entices you deeper once you’re outside the safety of your crashed ship, and JTTSP plays on this deviously. Pufferbirds, the first sentient beings you encounter, are at least 50 per cent eyeball, and their trusting coos are impossible not to find endearing. In a purely mechanical sense, they exist to produce carbon when you feed them Grob. What’s more pertinent is that if you overfeed Pufferbirds in your quest for carbon, they simply pop. Worse, the only way I found to make it past a meat vortex (think organic waste disposal) was to lure those wide-eyed, innocent Pufferbirds into vortex-sucking range and continue along the path while they were being eviscerated.
FIGHTING FAUNA
Very little of the plants and creatures around you is there just to fill the space, and there’s a mild puzzle element to almost everything with a pulse.
The irony is that the closer you come to fuelling your ship and starting the journey back home, the more bewitching your current climate becomes. The simple rules of each biome – use grapple seeds to scale the cliffs of Mt Gzarfyn, double-jump between the mushroom pads of the Fungi of Si’ned VII, lob blight bombs in the Matriarch’s Lair – become a kind of second nature that roots you to the place and turns a once totally alien landscape into something fondly familiar. PHIL IWANIUK