Lifeless Planet Premier Edition

What a pity... This surreal game could have been so much more. Instead it feels like a copius-told Sci-Fi story forced into the "frame" of a video game, which was then stretched to the maximum possible lenght. Now that I have played it, I remember numerous passages of the game which could have been deleted from the final product without experiencing big losses in the gameplay experience. I would have preferred a much shorter playthrough time instead of repeating those countless, redundant and replacable jumping levels or solving "puzzles" on the Kindergarten-difficulty-level...

Let's start with the only bad thing about the game, the reason it got four stars - at $20 it is a bit too expensive for a few hours fun. Few hours I say as there is no point re-playing the game, it is completely linear apart from a couple nooks and crannies you explore while you advance with the story. Apart from this, there is an exceptional vibe to the game, something you barely ever get to see in a video game nowadays. Your spacecraft crashes on a desolate planet and you are on your own. As you progress you try to find out what happened on this world that was said to be lush and full of life, only to discover the truth about the Soviet colony that was left behind. The reason I wanted to explore everything in the game is the fact that I realized I was really curious about every detail. It is an easy, non-violent platformer with only a handful of options, but a breathtaking adventure on a barren planet that will get you hooked for those couple hours for sure. I would recommend buying it as soon as the price drops a bit, this developer definitely deserves your money.

Lifeless Planet is one of the new breed of psychological exploration games, along the lines of MIND: Path to Thalamus and Proteus. You are never quite sure what is real and what is part of the protagonist's subjective state of mind. At times the game seems to be leading to a now-cliched resolution, but thankfully has a better outcome. The gameplay is adequate, being mostly linear exploration with a few things hidden along the side ways such as mineral samples to discover, though these do not add to the game in any other way other than rewarding your "find stuff" instinct. The challenges come from jump puzzles, push puzzles, and the occasion use of a robotic arm to manipulate things. The arm mechanism is the least satisfying, and actually glitched out on me late in the game, placing me at a previous arm puzzle when I activated it, though I finally found another glitch around that. The jump puzzles are the best challenges, especially when you get the jump boost. Speaking of the jump boost, you will obtain and lose it again several times during the game, in what is like a very obvious attempt to control the game flow. There are other ham-fisted elements, the worst being the "running out of oxygen" one, which never happens unless you are within walking distance of the next oxygen source. This artificial attempt to create drama is ultimately meaningless, though superior to constantly requiring you to find oxygen. Better if it were omitted entirely though. The other main flaw of the game is that the areas really don't connect. Each environment seems detached and separate, with no transition between them. You will struggle through a nighttime area towards a building, only reaching it to have the scene fade and find yourself now in a desert. In many ways this symbolises the game as a whole - it is not a sum of its parts, but a series of setpieces. Worth playing if you like the genre, and occasionally beautiful with good music, but doesn't quite come together as a whole.

The author claims he is inspired by Another World, The Dig, and Ico (as far as I remember). This immediately made me buy the game at 20$ price. Unfortunately, everything in this game is extremely boring. The puzzles are boring, the story is boring. There's no real twist, no way to be emotionally invested or intellectually stimulated. The game fails to scare you, to make you feel sadness or empathy, or to surprise your mind, even though it's obvious that the author tried. It's ironic that Quake 2, an action game, has level design that is more interesting to explore, than an indie adventure game like Lifeless Planet. The only reason I'm giving it 2 stars is that it's still impressive that only 1 man has created all of this. The graphics are very nice (for an indie project), there's attention to detail in the geology, etc. But it can't change the overall impression of the game. Another World, The Dig, and Ico are orders of magnitude away from Lifeless Planet.