Planet of Lana (2023, Windows) Review

ILO? ILO! ILO ILO ILO?! ILO-HOOO!

Planet of Lana is a straightforward side-scrolling, story-driven puzzle platformer with parallax scrolling and pretty visuals. We've seen it before; fledgling developer (Wishfully Studios), short game, nicely controlled, easy to like and very linear. It is simply put a safe and sound way for a developer to get their feet wet in the gaming industry. Its inspirations - Limbo and Inside - are also its biggest weaknesses, because it cannot quite measure up to the soaring emotional heights and immersive depths of those classics.

It just feels a bit too directed. Cutscenes with sentimental music halt the gameplay and redundant flashbacks (to stuff that just happened, mind you) interfere with the flow. Some clichés and sappy storytelling are enough to lessen the emotional impact of this tale for me, but after a shaky start these things mostly go away and the game started growing on me.

It begins in a nameless village by the ocean, depicted through vibrant natural scenery in the background as well as the foreground. The quaint peace is disturbed by a sudden invasion of a robotic force of aliens, falling like meteors from the sky. The situation is akin to War of the Worlds, with towering tripods (with five legs... pentapods?) trampling around the landscape in the background, while smaller ones hunt anything that moves. Lana's fellow villagers are all kidnapped, including her sister, and she must rescue them from the clutches of the invaders.

The sister's name is Ilo, which Lana won't let you forget anytime soon. She calls that name out an absurd amount of times throughout the game, even where it makes little sense. I picture her opening the fridge in one of the village huts, calling out for Ilo inside. It's easy to make fun of and join in, which I caught myself doing repeatedly even though no-one could hear me. A bad narrative decision, this is.

"Ilo?"

I like the game best when it distances itself from the storytelling and just focuses on the puzzles and stealth mechanics. The game controls nicely. Fluid animations give you the responsive moveset you'd expect from a game of its ilk. After a few close calls you escape the traumatic scene of the village and cross paths with a cute animal caught in a trap. You set it free and it becomes your chipmunk-voiced companion for most of the remainder of the game. A good creature, this is.

"Ilo!"

With simple commands you can direct the animal to aid you in the puzzle-solving. It might be to reach high ledges and push down a rope for you, burrow through the ground or activate plant-based light switches in dark caves. This becomes the gameplay's bread and butter and it's pretty fun. You can also pet the little catlike thing, which is great if you want to virtue signal. It's always fun to watch streamers gush over this feature, as if they've never seen it before, only to never do it again.

"IIILOOO!"

Stealth is simple but can nonetheless be challenging. Hiding in tall grass keeps you out of sight, but the distance to the safety of a nearby crawlspace might be too far. The patrolling spider droid or deadly animal in the vicinity will catch a glimpse of you, hunt you down and devour you in no time. Your animal companion can act as a distraction in these situations, but if he gets caught it's game over. How lucky, then, that the checkpoints are very generously spaced.

"ILO-HO-HOOO!"

These stealth sections combine with bog-standard box-dragging and clever lever puzzles, with some nice physics, to establish a fair and balanced challenge. Some complex puzzle setups took quite some time to figure out, but the solutions were always quite logical. I could work out a theory from visual cues and get it somewhat right. The difficulty curve is spot-on.

All the while, nicely drawn backgrounds presents the world as a rich, vibrant place worth saving. The unique enemies, plantlife, ancient overgrown environments and fictional spoken language give it an identity of its own. Inside the darkened caves and abandoned old buildings it presents weird iconography on the walls. You can interpret this as lore. I peronally didn't bother. And whilst it touches on mature themes and alludes to some primal fears (arachnophobia and fear of the dark, for instance) the story lacks the narrative punch to make much of it.

As a game Planet of Lana is nice and varied to play and ends precisely when it should, but as a story it is painless to ignore. Easily beatable in around 3 hours, I would recommended for players seeking a casual time in front of your favorite screen on a carefree weekend.