![]() Early on, I ignored a mission to find an alien alloy in favour of ‘looking for cool stuff in caves’, when I came across a miniature treasure puzzle hidden behind a labyrinth of crystalline tunnels. This isn’t quite an open world game – a Metroid-esque series of upgrades have to be bought with scavenged resources in order to access new areas and biomes – but it’s surprisingly self-directed. I spent almost none of those hours doing what Savage Planet asked me to, and I was very rarely reminded that I should be doing something else. I spent most of my opening hours obsessively scanning wildlife, working out what was coming out of the unidentified egg sacs I kept popping (turns out it’s a series of seeds, used for the likes of bouncing, grappling, or gluing prey to the floor), and returning to my ship/hub, the Javelin, to watch the Justin Roiland-flavoured adverts for dystopic products that play on every screen when you walk in. When Savage Planet begins, it absolutely is. That’s no bad thing, however, if the pursuit of 100% is fun along the way. Ultimately, all those inspirations amount to watching a series of numbers tick up in the form of a naked quest to discover 100% of places (which, delightfully, fills your ship with postcards for them, illustrated like ‘70s novel covers), find 100% of the buried bits of alien technology, and see 100% of nature’s cruellest mistakes. ![]() Spliced DNAInitially, Savage Planet offers the literal upward momentum and bright palette (both in colour and and emotion) of Grow Home, the slowly uncovered alien history/conspiracy of Outer Wilds, and the gameified taxonomy of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s Sheikah Slate camera. There’s a very broad, but not unenjoyable, satire at work behind all this, showing a version of future humanity devoured and repurposed by mega-corporations – which becomes just a touch ironic when you consider that the developer was bought by Google shortly before release. It’s an intoxicating set-up, prodding you into its well conceived (if slightly low-rent) pulp sci-fi world – monsters that liberally spray Nickelodeon gunge, giant mushrooms, inexplicably floating islands and all – teaching you how to get around, and then pretty much leaving you alone. With a certain inevitability, you soon discover that something else has visited AR-Y 26 before you, and your primary mission becomes to find out what it was, why it left gigantic structures all over the place and, perhaps most importantly, why it isn’t here anymore. Your job is to explore it, catalogue its flora and fauna, and see if there’s some kind of cosmic sludge lying around that you can use to refuel your ship and head home. Journey to the Savage Planet opens with a comedic flourish – a pleasingly overblown FMV featuring the CEO of Earth’s fourth-best interstellar exploration company informs you that you’ve landed, er, ‘heavily’ on a planet, codenamed AR-Y 26, that could be used to resettle our species. You wouldn’t know that upon starting out, however. Perhaps its biggest fault is that, as time goes on, it feels as though it can’t quite escape the inexorable gravitational pull towards combat video games so often have, ending with a feeling of ‘cut-price Far Cry’, rather than the grand science fiction experiment it could and perhaps should have been. ![]() There’s still combat, but Journey to the Savage Planet’s world is also used as a platform for non-guided exploration, puzzle solving, scavenger hunts, and loads of fart jokes.
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