Early on you find yourself a jetpack, which lets you double-hop in mid air. This will be utilised often. Lifeless Planet likes jumping. It loves, loves, loves jumping. In fact, some way through my two hours with the game I began to wonder if it loved jumping a little too much. The floaty, low-gravity traversal, where one wrong move can lead to a fatal plummet, occasionally crosses over into frustrating territory when you splat yourself against the side of a turbine for the nineteenth time.
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| Those Soviets and their giant obsidian wheels, eh? |
Sometimes it seems like the developers felt obliged to add rote game mechanics to accompany the exploration, and the results don't always feel quite right. Hopping across those grand, sweeping vistas can be oddly hypnotic and satisfying, but when the game pulls the old 'push a barrel up against the wall to jump over' trick for the third time it takes you slightly out of an otherwise distinct experience. Likewise with your mechanical appendage, used to slot certain objects into unreachable areas.
I'm hoping that the full release won't bog down the story-telling and sight-seeing with too much hopping about and shuttling items around. When it stops showing me cool things and resorts to busywork, Lifeless Planet begins to feel worryingly like a slightly tedious platformer. Which it really isn't!
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| The game has a great eye for intriguing imagery |
With clever, dream-like imagery that mixes the barren wastes of an alien planet with looming industrial machinery and abandoned habitation, and an excellent moody score underpinning the exploration, it's a game that conjures a truly memorable atmosphere of isolation and mystery. You're continuously drawn towards the next horizon, wondering what sights the game will show you next. It's the closest thing I've seen in a game, in terms of atmosphere, to something like 2001: A Space Odyssey. No laser guns or gribbly alien critters here. Just a vast landscape littered with monolithic structures, dwarfing your intrepid astronaut as he presses on alone.
Lifeless Planet shines in these moments of quiet solitude; wandering through an abandoned village in the desert, cresting a hill to see a colossal dam crossing the cavern below, spotting what looks like a solitary figure in the distance. The game didn't need rudimentary puzzles to keep me interested. I was gripped as soon as I hauled myself over a dune rise and found a manual in the dirt beneath my feet, a Soviet symbol emblazoned on the front. The game is full of such arresting imagery.
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| For sale: fishing shack overlooking giant hole in the earth |
The story steers clear of endless expository cutscenes. Most of the time you're piecing together exactly what the hell's going on from scattered audio files and clues. A restrained voice-over occasionally kicks in revealing, in the form of an interview, more about the original mission your team of astronauts were undertaking. Recovered audio is actually in Russian, which is a nice touch, though your magical organiser handily translates it for you. Only two hours in and I'm barely scratching the surface of the mystery, but already I want to find out more. Is this place even real, or is it the fever dream of a dying astronaut?
Even if the story disappoints and the puzzles continue to be a little underwhelming, I'm intrigued enough by the spectacle of Lifeless Planet to want to get my hands on the full version. If you like hard sci-fi and you're looking for something a little more measured and thoughtful than the average alien-blasting simulator, this should be right up your alley. It's out on Steam Early Access now, with a full release planned later in 2014.
Top Game Moment: Waiting to see what's around the next corner. Lifeless Planet always has something special to show you.
