Journey To The Savage Planet

IN SPACE, NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU LAUGH

- SAM WHITE

It starts, as all good sci-fi adventures usually do, with a crash landing and a catastrophically damaged ship. So, stranded on a distant planet that’s supposedly devoid of life yet home to an enormous alien-made structure, it’s your job – loyal employee of the definitely-above-board Kindred Aerospace company – to figure out what the hell is going on.

If the setup sounds familiar it’s because it really is. Playable solo or – if you’d prefer to listen to your mate instead of the game’s brilliantly funny dialogue – in co-op, Journey To The Savage Planet feels much like what No Man’s Sky would’ve been had Hello Games put a game in it. Yet it also plucks generously from several other recent contemporaries; the humorous irreverence of Borderlands, the peaceful puzzle-solving of The Witness, as well as the free-form exploration of all good Metroidvanias, to name a few.

Yet while it wears its influences on the sleeve of its futuristic spacesuit, it also does more than enough to set itself apart from the games and genres it plucks from. Key to that is the world you inhabit. From Porg-like Pufferbirds to avian-churning Meat Vortexes that open up new pathways if you feed them chubby chickens, it’s chock full of flora and fauna that are weird, wonderful and – in the case of the birds – undeniably cute.