January 27th, 2020
We get a lot of funny video games. We get a lot of strange games. But wacky video games are rare. Journey To The Savage Planet, a short new sci-fi first-person shooter, is, despite some flaws, wonderfully wacky.
In this game, you don’t punch enemies. You slap them, complete with a comedic thwack sound. Alien birds fart carbon. You fling purple goo at giant frogs. All of this wackiness makes Journey To The Savage Planet feel less like Star Wars or Mass Effect and more like a campy retro sci-fi film that would have been riffed on. And like those films, Savage Planet sometimes feels like a bit of a mess with annoying bugs and a story that never really goes anywhere.
Journey To The Savage Planet is a game about exploration, adventure, and puzzle-solving that just so happens to include some crafting and shooting. The setup is simple. You are an explorer sent to a lush planet called AR-Y 26 by the crappy space company Kindred Aerospace. Your mission is to survey the planet and all of its creatures, plants, caves, and rivers. Kindred boasts that it is the fourth-best intergalactic exploration company, which means they don’t have a lot of money. You are sent to this strange planet with nothing but a spacesuit, a 3D printer, an AI assistant and a ship with no fuel for a return trip. Good luck!
Starting the player with basically nothing serves two purposes. It establishes that your company is greedy and incompetent, which is a running theme throughout the game. It also creates the game’s core loop. Players explore the world, collect materials like carbon, return to their ship, use the 3D printer to build a weapon, suit upgrades, new gadgets and other bits of gear, then exit and explore some more. The goal is to survey the planet, find fuel and leave.
AR-Y 26 is broken into a few biomes, each made up of smaller areas. Each section of the planet contains different creatures, plant life and places to investigate. You’ll explore snowy caves filled with cute and fluffy birds, big desert areas where dangerous alien-lizards roam about and even weird floating islands made rock and mud. As you explore you will encounter weird animals and plants. This is not a peaceful process.
In the fiction of this game, no one cares about the planet or its life. The explorer you are playing is a voiceless protagonist who recklessly damages ancient artifacts, kills hundreds of innocent and docile creatures and who grabs anything that isn’t nailed down. All in the pursuit of getting paid and leaving. Kindred is clearly more invested in extracting resources from this planet than treating it with the respect it deserves. As soon as you exit your spaceship, you get a trophy called “Colonizer.” So, yeah, you aren’t a force of good. While the game makes a lot of jokes about this theme and the ending tries to hammer it home a little more, ultimately the wacky and fun atmosphere of Savage Planet distracts from the darker part of the story, which never becomes much more than a background detail.
The game doesn’t have narrative depth, but it is visually arresting and fun even if it is filled with a lot of…uh..goo…
Do you enjoy seeing goo in your video games? Hopefully, you do, because Savage Planet is overflowing with alien goo. A lot of the systems in the game involve goos of various colours. Orange goo pods are hidden around the planet. Smashing them into your face rewards you with more health and stamina. Purple goo can be collected and tossed at enemies to stick them to the ground, making it easier to shoot them. Enemies pop open when killed, blasting the area with goo.
Things get gross but in a cartoonish and colourful way. This tidal wave of neon goo also highlights how vibrant Savage Planet looks. Nearly every biome has a distinct palette of garish colours like a cover of an old sci-fi novel. Creatures are covered in pink, lime green, and purple skin. The mountains are different shades of red and yellow. It’s all so lovely and disgusting, but in a good way.