Journey to the Savage Planet is a 2020 first-person metroidvania that’s selling pretty well, and if you’ve played it, it’s absolutely awesome, but the weird thing is, there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of it. This is often the fate of bright, colorful, fun-first games that don’t adhere to the industry’s dark, stern frown. Well, except for the ones with Pokémon in them.
Revenge of the Savage Planet Taking the explosively bright and cheerful nature of the original, making it bigger, brighter, and more energetic, changing it to third person, and then using it all to tell a satirical allegory about modern capitalism and the current state of the gaming industry.
There’s a reason for the latter shift. Developer Raccoon Logic was once the developer behind Typhoon Studios, and it’s been through some bad shit. At the height of Google’s extravagant and overconfident plans for its disastrous streaming service Stadia, the company acquired Typhoon as an in-house developer and then unceremoniously “tipped us off” (as co-founder and former creative director Alex Hutchinson said) Far Cry 4 and Assassin’s Creed III Said in our hands-on demo) a few months later. to preserve their rights savage planet IP, they sold the first game to publisher 505 Games so that they wouldn’t see a penny of sales, and… well, you can see why this game positioned itself as “the first game in an IP A future defeated by greed and profit.” madness. “
So Hutchinson and co-founder Reid Schneider (” mad max, Arkham Originsand Army of Two) announced that this new, larger, and more ambitious sequel is being self-published.
Just like the original game, Return to the Savage Planet is a massive 3D metroidvania set on a crazy planet (or in this case four planets) populated by bizarre creatures that can be shot, kicked, or this time captured and taken away To your base and locked up in a pen, uh, experimented.
The story takes place in the same universe, but in a different time and environment. Your space exploration company has recently been acquired by a large multinational company, Altar, which then sends you on a deep space exploration mission a hundred years away. However, 20 years after entering cryosleep, you realize that the work is “expensive and difficult, and decide to quit the industry entirely.” Yeah, that’s not entirely subtle.
Revenge of the Savage Planet demonstration
When you land on the planet you’re supposed to explore, you discover that you were laid off 80 years ago and all the equipment, buildings, and items you need are scattered across different planets. As Hutchinson says, “One of the things I discovered is that satire and science fiction are never about the future, they’re always about the present.”
You must then find all the equipment and collect everything you need to rebuild your spaceship in order to return to Earth for revenge. This is accomplished through third-person exploration, with an ever-growing set of abilities that allow you to reach previously impossible ledges, or break sealed doors—you know the Metroidvania drill.
what makes savage planet Standing out is that simple weird Everything is like that. In this game, you can spray hostile creatures with a water gun until they absorb so much liquid that they expand into giant platforms to jump on, or you leave a trail of slime on a mass of slimes (here, a translucent one containing a lot of slime cube). attack.
As you play, more planets will be unlocked, with their own biomes and unique creatures. You will also collect parts for building and improving your own house, decorating it with furniture and features sent in advance by the altar, the distinguishing feature of which is that all of them are completely impractical and functionally useless. (Quite brilliantly, you have to buy these with currency you find while exploring, and the altar is still willing to take your money to buy pointless Gubbins, but won’t try to save you.) At some point, you’ll Explore the entire world. The small villages of temporary homes that were once meant for those who came after you can no longer be filled.
Chaos often occurred during demos presented by the game’s lead producer, which just adds to the sequel’s appeal. This chaos is definitely more fun in the new co-op mode, whether playing remotely or split-screen, where your friends mess up and get you into a whole lot of trouble, leading to all sorts of fights. But the point is, these are escape-able situations, not fun game-overs.
The third person perspective needs some changes. The bottom line is that you can no longer slap everything in the game, which doesn’t work in this new perspective. So now you can kick everything off. It also offers a bunch of new visual gags, especially the absolutely hilarious jogging and running animations, and the ridiculous arms and legs that make me laugh every time I see them. There will also be a series of wearable suits, each one dangerously close to someone else’s intellectual property rights. When I nerdyly noticed a StarCraft VI Hutchinson mentioned that some of the enemy’s gonads were placed on his knees and he requested StarCraft Red shirt uniform. I asked why the character wasn’t killed immediately? Before the question ended, Hutchinson interrupted me and said, “You will when you launch! Put on this suit and you will die immediately! Before we can resurrect you and continue living. This new perspective is also chosen because It lends itself better to platforming rather than just being funny.
At this point, the 30-person company (“How do you manage to keep the team from bloating?” I asked. “Because there’s no money,” Alex Hutchinson replied) puts the welfare of developers before the interests of the game. No retrenchment has taken place and no retrenchment is planned, although development entering its final six months may stress test that resolve. But this is a company that has risen from the ashes of corporate idiocy and now seems determined to do things its own way. Let’s be clear – it’s not normal in this industry to be so honest about their disastrous interactions with major corporations, and the freedom to do so is clearly well-received.
From my brief but extremely interesting glimpse Return to the Savage Planetwhich seems to be taking forever to channel, larger themes that contain sarcastic venom despite achieving moments of joyful silliness and rock-solid action while playing the game. Unless, uh, listen, I’m not really sure what they mean by experimenting with captured creatures.
.
