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.
