Journey to the Wild Planet It’s the first-person Metroidvania of 2020, and it’s sold pretty well and is absolutely fantastic if you’ve played it, but oddly enough, there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of it. That’s a fate too often reserved for bright, colorful, fun-focused games that don’t fit the frown of the industry’s somber seriousness. Except, of course, for the ones with Pokémon in them.
Revenge of the Savage Planet takes the explosively bright and cheerful nature of the original and makes it bigger, brighter, more vibrant, switches to third person, and then uses all of that to tell a satirical parable about the state of modern capitalism and the gaming industry.
There's a reason for this latest reversal. The developers at Raccoon Logic, once Typhoon Studios developers, have been through a lot of shit. At the height of Google's over-the-top and overconfident plans for its disastrous streaming service Stadia, the company acquired Typhoon as an in-house developer and unceremoniously “spit us back out” (former co-founder Alex Hutchinson, former creative director Far Cry 4 And Assassins Creed III says a few months later during our hands-on demo. To protect their rights Wild Planet The IP sold the first game to publisher 505 Games, so they never made a dime from sales, and… you can see why the game is described as being set in “a future that's been thrown off-axis by corporate greed and stupidity.”
So, both Hutchinson and co-founder Reid Schneider (the film's producer) pulled this off with a pretty big victory. Mad Max, Arkham OriginsAnd Two man army) has announced the self-release of this new, much bigger, much more ambitious sequel.
Like the original game, Return to the Wild Planet is a sprawling 3D Metroidvania set on a crazy planet (or four planets, in this case), filled with wonderfully weird creatures who can be shot and kicked, or – this time – captured and taken to your base to be caged and experimented on.
Set in the same universe but in a different time and setting, your space exploration company has recently been acquired by a large multinational corporation, Altar, which then sends you on a deep space exploration mission a hundred years away. However, 20 years into your cryosleep, you realize that the job is “expensive and difficult, so you've decided to quit the industry altogether.” Well, not exactly subtle.
Revenge of the Savage Planet show
When you land on the planet you're supposed to be exploring, you learn that you were laid off 80 years ago and that all the equipment, buildings, and items you needed were dispersed to different planets. As Hutchinson says, “One thing I discovered is that satire and science fiction are never about the future, they're always about the present.”
You must then access all of this equipment and gather everything you need to rebuild a spaceship to return to Earth for your revenge. This is done through third-person exploration with an ever-growing set of abilities that allow you to reach previously impossible ledges or break through sealed doors – you know the Metroidvania drill.
What does it do? Wild Planet It's just how simple it is that stands out strange That's it. It's a game where you fight hostile creatures, squirting them with a water gun until they absorb so much liquid that they expand into large platforms to jump on, or laying a trail of slime across a bunch of snot (in this case, translucent cubes with bulging eyes that roll around) and then setting it on fire, which might accidentally set a bigger, badder monster awake and then wake up another group of creatures, and you're suddenly struggling to deal with a crazy attack, running and jumping and sliding your way out of trouble.
As you play, more planets are unlocked, each with their own biomes and unique creature sets. You’ll also collect parts to build and upgrade your own home, decorating it with furniture and features sent to you by Altar in advance, all of which are defined by their complete impracticality and functional uselessness. (Crunchily enough, you have to buy these with a currency you find while exploring, but Altar is still willing to take your money for meaningless things, but makes no attempt to save you.) At some point, you’ll discover a small village of makeshift homes, once designed for those who would follow you, now never to be filled.
During the demo played by the game's executive producer, chaos often ensued, which added to the sequel's appeal. And that chaos looks even more fun in the new cooperative modes, where your friend can prank you and get you into all sorts of trouble, whether played remotely or split-screen. But the point is that these aren't fun endgames, but avoidable ones.
The third-person view required a few changes. The most important one was that you can no longer slap everything in the game, which didn't work in this new perspective. So now you can kick everything. It also introduces a bunch of new visual jokes, most notably the absolutely hilarious running and sprinting animations, the ridiculously outstretched arms and legs that made me laugh every time I saw them. There's also a collection of suits to wear, each one dangerously close to the other's IP. Like a nerd Star Wars VI When Hutchinson mentioned that some enemies have gonads on their knees, Star Wars red shirt uniform. I asked why the character wasn't killed off right away. Before I could finish the question, Hutchinson interrupted me and said, “You're going to be killed off in the beginning! Put on this outfit and die right away! Before I bring you back to life to continue.” This new perspective was chosen because it worked better for the platform, not just for entertainment purposes.
Meanwhile, the 30-person company (“How do you keep the team from bloating even further?” I asked. “Because you don’t have any money,” Alex Hutchinson replied) is putting the well-being of its developers ahead of the game’s production. There have been no hardships, and there aren’t any planned ones, but entering the final six months of development will likely strain that resolve. But this is a company that has risen like a phoenix from the ashes of corporate stupidity and now appears determined to do things on its own terms. Let’s be clear—it’s not normal in this industry to be so honest about its disastrous interactions with giant corporations, and the freedom to do so is clearly relished.
From my short but extremely entertaining perspectives Return to the Wild Planetthis seems to be channeled for good, the larger themes of satirical venom not reaching the game's gleeful absurdity and rock-solid action of the moment-to-moment gameplay. Unless, well, look, I'm not really sure what they mean by experimenting on captured creatures.
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