Game ReviewsPlanet of Lana | Review
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Game ReviewsPlanet of Lana | ReviewPosted:
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Planet of Lana Review
General Information Name: Planet of Lana Genre: Puzzle / Platformer Release Date: May 2023 Developer: Wishfully Studios Modes: Single-player Platforms: All (as of 2024) https://i.gyazo.com/ea6a6900926fea19101d4e3174e2bbf8.png The Story The game puts forth a relatively simple story. It begins with a young girl, Lana, and her sister, Elo, playing on a floating raft community in a region that is resemblant of South-East Asia, perhaps Indonesia. They chase each other through their community before reaching land and running up onto a hill. As they crest the hill, a number of metallic capsules are seen falling across the sky. Shortly afterwards, a large, airborne, robotic machine arrives and takes away Elo. The girl avoids abduction by hiding in the tall grasses a short distance away. Once the machine departs, carrying her sister in an external retractable cage, the young girl sets off running in the direction that her sister has been taken. As Lana runs down the hill, she encounters her first robot, which she must pass undetected. Once she succeeds in this task, she returns to her community, to find some structural damage and discovers that nobody has been spared from captivity by the machines. In the distance she observes enormous robots traversing the landscape and further capsules falling to Earth. She evades the robots in her village and crosses over to the land on the east of her village. Here, she manoeuvres her way through a cave and eventually comes out to some grasslands, where she collapses into sleep to the backdrop of an oversized moon alighting the night as numerous colossal machines slowly traverse the land. Lana continues to cross the land using her ingenuity to overcome obstacles until she meets and rescues a small black cat-like creature called Mui, whom she becomes fast friends with. The two compliment one another's abilities as they travel across different environments while continuing the evade robots and overcome challenges together. The two companions eventually reach a desert where they are separated by a falling rock and Mui is captured by the invaders. Lana continues her journey alone, now with the intention of saving both Mui and Elo, however she collapses during a storm while she is crossing a great, empty swathe of desert. She is then found and carried to a small settlement by an old desert-dwelling man, the first free human to be seen in the game since the invasion began. When Lana awakens, she tries to communicate with the old man but realises that she has travelled so far that they speak entirely different languages than one another. The old man shows her a damaged robot, which Lana manages to awaken using a five note melody that seems to be the key to reprogramming the metallic invaders. The robot she repairs is able to run quickly, and Lana rides it across the desert while being chased by a great number of malintentioned robots. She rides the robot to a landing site of the automated army, before it is destroyed and she managed to sneak her way onto a transport ship that carries her to the main base of the invaders, which seems to be somewhere off of Earth. While aboard the base, Lana finds that the robots are harvesting the animal life of her planet and sees that Mui is in line for the same fate. To her surprise, the system rejects Mui and (s)he is carried off elsewhere. Lana follows the trail and saves Mui from imprisonment to be reunited once more. The pair continue to work together to progress through the ship until they find all of the humans of Earth held in solitary glass cells. Lana runs through the prison until she finds her sister, Elo. Yet, just as she finds her, she is spotted and engages in a high speed chase through the ship until she falls into the central chamber of the base where the energy force for the robot army seems to be held. Together, Lana and Mui override the energy force and is able to reprogram the army to begin serving humanity, rather than oppressing it. The game ends with Lana and Mui playing in their home village, which now lives in harmony with the inhabitants robotic captors, before running together back up the hill where they meet with Elo at the same place they were when the invasion first began. The Background / World
This is a game almost entirely lacking in verbal communication which leaves the player piecing together to world from their own perception of events. This creates a large part of the game's magic and leaves the player to their own subjective interpretations of the game world. It seems that the game is set amongst a unique and consistent ecosystem, quite dissimilar to our own, which the player must learn the workings of in order to progress. There are many similarities with our world, yet the temporal existence of the game may take place in an undetermined period of the past, or could be set entirely in underdeveloped regions of the modern world. There is little modernity to be observed throughout the game other than the otherworldly and futuristic robots that have invaded the world. This creates a stark contrast between the natural environment, those who embody it and the cold metallic and futuristic intrusion that interrupts the seeming harmony of the world. That is, until the reprogramming of robotic minds and the eventual co-operation and mutually beneficial relationship that develop after Lana's planet-saving escapades are complete. Gameplay
This game boasts simple yet enthralling gameplay, similar to most other platformers in many regards. Put simply, the player spends most of their time running, jumping, swinging, hiding and moving obstacles around in order to solve puzzles that allow the player to move from A to B and continue Lana's plight. Playing as a small girl in a mostly hostile world of scary predators and mechanical force, the player must learn to observe and move intelligently. Most puzzles require Lana to observe how to environment is structured and how those that pose threats to her behave in order to manipulate the world to her needs. The player is able to take control of some robots and to command Mui to move around and interact with the environment in order to progress through areas. Mui possesses special abilities which allow him/her to hold influence over otherwise unfriendly creatures that reside across the games regions. Throughout the game, Lana learns to assist Mui in taking advantage of the abilities that (s)he is blessed with. There are also certain hidden areas in some of the levels that can be discovered through out-of-the-box thinking by the player. These areas seem to contain secret ancient information inscribed onto shrines that Lana constructs into a singular image once all of the shrines have been found. The Visual Aspect
The visual and sound aspects of this game are what truly set this game apart from other games within this genre. While at a first glance Planet of Lana is graphically simple, the player quickly realises that the artwork and style used to create this world are mightily impressive. The colour scheme of the game is quite muted, allowing the colours to naturally and seamlessly blend together to reflect recognizable environments. The game bares its soul when it plays with perspective through a shifting of the cameras zoom in order to shift the focus of the player. Lana frequently finds herself traversing different environments such as a sea via a raft, a vast and empty desert via a horse-type robot, a graveyard of skeletal behemoths via foot and a landscape under a starry nights sky. During these moments, and many more, the camera pans out to provide a greater focus on the games world and to detract from the focused attention on Lana herself. During one scene that requires the player to simply run forward, the camera slowly moves backwards to detail a desert sunrise and Lana, who is now little more than a dot in the corner of the screen to the player, runs for almost five minutes in order to progress through the scene. This allows the player to reconsider there role and importance within the games world and the greater happenings of the universe. This same feeling is re-evoked through a number of different scenarios, all of which add a depth to the game that far exceeds anything that it's gameplay offers. During these moments, the scene is often overlaid with complimentary music and audio which contribute to the perspectives that the game explores. Controls
The controls found in this game are some of the most simple to be found across console gaming. The player runs, jumps and crouches using the buttons that one would expect. The environment can be interacted at moments suggested to the player by the game. The greatest difficulties one will experience are those when timings must be precise and robots must be controlled, as they are terribly clunky although this is likely to be the intentional feel of these moments. Overall, the controls are simplistic, easy and to industry standard. Ratings
Story: 7/10 World: 9/10 Gameplay: 8/10 Visuals: 10/10 Controls: 9/10 Overall: 9/10 |
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I Downloaded the game a few weeks ago, but have yet to play it.
I love games with these kinds of graphics, but I'm not the biggest fan of side-view / side-scroller games. I heard the story is one of a kind though; on par with Ori, the only other side-scroller game I've played. I'll probably sit down with the girlfriend and give it a try; she's always bugging me to play something with her :/ Nice review! |
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