Journey to the Savage Planet
Discover the comedy inherent in exploration.
DEVELOPER TYPHOON STUDIOS • PUBLISHER 505 GAMES • RELEASE SPRING 2020 www.savageplanetgame.com
Lead designer Alex Hutchinson calls Journey to the Savage Planet an “earnest comedy”. What he means by that is on the colourful planet you explore as part of the fourth best interstellar exploration company, you embrace that things can and will go wrong, and you get to laugh at yourself in the process.
The point of Savage Planet, and by extension exploration games in general, is that you don’t set off beset with sleek, expensive gear. Instead everything from your equipment to how you come across new locations and species, has a distinct air of improvisation to it. My jetpack belches huge clouds of smoke when I use it to double-jump onto a platform, and a wide-eyed, birdlike alien I shoot splatters me with goo. Kindred Aerospace, the company that sent your character to this planet, may run advertisements that make exploring seem like a luxurious business, but it’s more like doing dangerous manual labour without health insurance.
Hutchinson and I are playing a portion of the game’s later missions. You can play JTTSP alone but he strongly recommends diving in with a friend, “For me there’s something magical in two-player co-op in particular, just you and your best friend or you and your kid. I think especially that an exploration game is really wellsuited for co-op, you‘re starting a new experience and finding cool things together.”
My character has already received a few visor upgrades and gadgets in order to discover new locations. This is a very Metroidvania approach – just finding your way in or up something is half the task, and if no solution presents itself, it’s probably because you’re missing the means to move ahead. Not to worry though, there are several missions to follow at any given time, and the planet, consisting of several different biomes, is open to you.
BELLY LAUGHS
After attacking one of the birds for the acid they secrete in order to open a door, a whole flock decides to swarm us. Hutchinson gives one of them a hearty kick, hitting me and volleying me off a platform, right into a pool of lava. Startled, I laugh, realising that this is exactly the kind of comedy the game is going for. “The tools in your arsenal all allow for some fun,” Hutchinson says, “You have a binding ball for example, meant to be used to stick a creature to a spot, but you can of course also stick your partner to surfaces. Once I have created something like this, I try to create as many situations as possible in which this could happen, either deliberately or accidentally.” It’s a technique Hutchinson used often when he worked on the Far Cry series, famous for nature being out to get you, at Ubisoft Montreal. Hutchinson wants you to make mischief.
Playing around with the acid bombs in my pack, I almost forget I have a gun. That, too, is deliberate. Journey to the Savage Planet isn’t a shooter, it’s a game where you sometimes shoot things. In the end, Hutchinson and I didn’t get a whole lot done in the traditional sense, but we found underground caverns, saw snowstorms in the distance and knocked into each other swinging from our grappling hooks, and I consider that time well spent.