Hold To Reset

Building a new game, a new studio and a new life from the ground up

With his new game g in the wild at last, Alex Hutchinson Hutc gets specific

Barring some unforeseen disaster or catastrophic hard-drive failure, our game,

Journey To The Savage Planet, was announced on December 6 at The Game Awards in Los Angeles. We really hope it piqued your interest. It feels like we just started but already we’re coming up on the second anniversary of the studio, so it feels amazing to finally be able to talk more openly about the game.

Based on the name, you can probably guess that there’s a pulpy sci-fi quality to the game, and while it’s definitely not retro, we wanted to recapture the days when the genre was filled with optimistic and hopeful stories, the days when people imagined journeying to the stars in search of adventure and glory, when everyone was certain that intelligent life was a common feature of the universe and that the future of humanity was a massive opportunity we should all work together to grasp.

In game terms, it’s a feeling I remember from playing games as a kid. Hopeful; upbeat; positive; fun. We want those cerulean blue skies that made so many Sega games pop; we want the weird and wacky creatures from the D&D Monstrous Manual that you couldn’t quite wrap your head around; we want the feeling of exploring the unknown, with little equipment but high hopes. We’re tired of reality. We’re tired of grey and brown and escaping the apocalypse. Let’s all go on an adventure-vacation off-planet instead.

And hopefully it’s funny. Not in a ‘watch the humorous cinematics’ kind of way, but in that uniquely videogame version of slapstick where you can’t help but laugh as your co-op partner runs past you while being pursued by a bear on fire. It’s a systemic form of humour that is unique to our medium and criminally underutilised. We have tried to layer in as many optional systems and opportunities for the player as possible, so as you stumble around our world, following either one of our objectives or one of your own, you should trip over content that’s surprising and funny as well as occasionally challenging.

In Savage Planet you work for a company called Kindred Aerospace, a group of space pioneers who are charmingly proud of being the fourth-best space exploration company in operation, and who have sent you to a random planet to see if there’s any chance that it could be used as a future home for humanity. It’s your job to explore it, catalogue its flora and fauna, survive and see what secrets it holds, even though at the start of the game you have quite literally nothing but a can of beans as a tool. (At least they’re space beans.)

We’re also jettisoning a lot of the heavy storytelling we’ve sometimes embraced in the past in favour of a more player-driven experience. Objectives come and go as you identify needs in the environment, and even though there are many designed encounters, we’re trying to keep the choice of where, when and how as much in your hands as possible.

To be clear, it’s not an MMORPG and it’s not a survival crafting game. It’s a firstperson adventure for normal people in extraordinary situations. If I could have made your character slightly overweight without it feeling ridiculous then I would have. You play yourself, sent into space in the face of epic odds but with a thirst for challenge and a lust for being the first person to set foot on a new world. And as an explorer, you are not just a soldier: you are as much a botanist, a cartographer and a hiker as you are a person with guns.

Which is good, because the world you find yourself in looks bit like the cover to an old Yes album. It’s bright and colourful and not much like Earth at all. We wanted to send you to a place our former employers would never have let us build: weird, completely unmoored from reality and happily disobeying most laws of physics and nature. And you’ll get to do it with none of the business trappings that have started to pollute the triple-A space either. No loot boxes, no pay to win, no pointless grinding, no microtransactions and no algorithmic porridge content trying to drag out a short experience forever.

We’re trying to make the kind of game you could play with your best friend on the couch on a Saturday morning, talking and strategising and laughing, rather than watching cinematics. It’s the kind of game that you can finish, and the kind of game that I hope says a lot about the kind of studio Typhoon will become.

That said, I showed my five-year-old son Kasper the opening scenes, and he said, ‘What is this? It’s about nothing.’ So maybe hold off on the preorder until my next column.

We’re tired of grey and brown and escaping the apocalypse. Let’s all go on an adventure vacation off-planet