This cinematic 2D platformer is the debut release from indie developer Wishfully Studios, and if they’re setting out to make a name for themselves as an artistically minded team with a rock-solid grip on puzzle platformer mechanics then mission accomplished.
Set on an alien yet familiar world you play as young girl Lana, who we meet enjoying a bucolic life in her cosy fishing village. Naturally, as is the fate of practically every video game hero’s cosy home town, disaster soon strikes.
Robots emerge from the blue skies to entrap the locals and promptly speed off into the distance. Lana is the sole survivor and must rescue her ambiguously defined best friend/girlfriend/sister/boyfriend/brother from their steel clutches.
About twenty minutes Lana’s journey becomes a lot less lonely when she meets Mui, a synthesis of cat, dog and monkey (but mostly cat). Mui has been precision-engineered by character designers to be pure strain adorable. I know that I’m being manipulated, but the moment I saw its little butt wiggle as it sized up a long leap I knew I would die for this fuzzily-defined blob of black pixels.
Planet of Lana’s DNA stretches back as far as Eric Chahi’s 1991 Amiga classic Another World, and there’s definitely something of that game's stark and alien environmental design visible here. But while Another World is cool and barren, much of Planet of Lana teems with luscious watercolour greenery, which each screen delivering knockout vistas of sunny beaches or arid deserts. Let’s just say my screenshot button got a heavy workout.
The fully orchestrated score is no slouch either. I love an indie chiptune as much as the next person, but hearing a full orchestra kicking into motion as the camera pulls out and some humungous mechanical monstrosity strides across the desert cranks up the cinematic feel way beyond what the visuals alone achieve.
There’s also a neat musical motif that recurs throughout both the story and the score in a conscious echo of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, with the short melody woven into two very satisfying musical puzzles.
As the unfortunate owner of two tin ears when it comes to matching pitch-based conundrums I whimpered when I realized I had to correctly tune a giant pipe organ-lookin’ thing to open a door, though figuring out the solution through contextual environmental clues proved to be extremely my jam.
It’s difficult to pick any holes in the game’s audio/visual presentation. For the entirety of its run-time, it’s a marvel to see and hear. But as for how it plays? Well, it’s a by-the-numbers puzzle platformer in which your progress will be impeded by locked doors or impassable obstacles, with you having to shove crates around, flip switches, and distract enemies to proceed. Mui provides something of a fun wrinkle by having to figure out how to exploit its unique abilities or transport it across bodies of water though, frankly, it’s nothing, especially new gameplay-wise.
There’s a polished competency to each puzzle, each of which has been playtested to within an inch of its life to nudge even the dopiest player to the credits. The problem is that this has tuned the difficulty so low that the solutions can be figured out in a matter of moments, but then you face the tedium of executing them.
I was impatiently drumming my fingers watching Lana slowly swim across a lake to retrieve a log, then slooooowly swim back with it to put Mui on it, then slooooooowly swim back over with her. C’mon Lana, there are killer robots here, a little urgency wouldn’t go amiss.
Planet of Lana is clearly (and probably correctly) prioritising atmosphere over challenging gameplay, but I’d have appreciated the beautiful scenery much more if I’d had to work just a little bit harder to get there.
More subjectively, what are clearly meant to be the emotional and artistic crescendoes scattered throughout the game fell just short of success. There’s that classic trick of giving you a moment of respite while a female vocalist strikes up a wistful tune, some haunting dream sequences, and moments of heroic sacrifice. It’s very clear what the game wants to achieve, but perhaps over-exposure to well-meaning, sincere and self-consciously arty indie games have raised the bar just a teeny bit too high.
As an example of how to do this right, there’s Playdead’s 2017 classic Inside. That and Planet of Lana have a hell of a lot in common, but while Inside’s imagery (and all-time bonkers ending) is indelibly burnt into my brain I can already feel myself forgetting Planet of Lana.
SUMMARY
Maybe I’m being a bit harsh. It’s not that there’s anything notably wrong with Planet of Lana and it’s clearly had a lot of care and attention poured into it, but it’s a silver medallist with dreams of winning the gold.
That said, if Wishfully Games are trying to convince a publisher to snap them up, Planet of Lana is one hell of a jewel on your company’s CV.
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