![]() After some questions in the first half hour, it's one hundred percent clear that this is all literally happening. However, for some baffling reason, the developers choose to abandon ambiguity almost immediately. If this were all taking place inside the head of someone dying of oxygen deprivation in a crashed lander, some of the bizarre design choices would have clicked. After all, the game opens with the main character being knocked unconscious, and for the first ten minutes or so he suffers from recurring hallucinations. Sparky's main review was right to point out the dreamlike qualities of the game world. However, its appearance at the outset of the adventure creates all sorts of issues because it doesn't make a lick of sense-and not in the good, trippy-70s-sci-fi way, either. It's a striking juxtaposition, and well worth building a game around. They clearly found an image that resonated with them-that of a small Russian village on a dead planet deep in space. Lifeless Planet's biggest problem is the developers' refusal to think through the logic of the world they've created. It's just too bad that for most of the game's running time, the experience is too muddled to express what it's trying to accomplish. We want to see something impossible, then have the rush of discovering that our eyes haven't deceived us, and that the universe is far more interesting than we'd realized.Īt its best, when it has the main character standing at the foot of an alien obelisk or standing atop a dam built to harness the energy of an alien river, Lifeless Planet captures this feeling. ![]() These are the experiences that we want exploration-based sci-fi to capture. Watching a strange star rise over the wrong horizon. ![]() The look of alien life with no analog on Earth. The feeling of strange dirt underneath boots. WTF Let's pause a moment for our national anthem! LOW Having to walk on high-tension wires in a spacesuit. HIGH Quietly taking in the alien scenery.
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