Journey to the wild planet is a first-person Metroidvania from 2020 that sold pretty well and was absolutely fantastic if you played it, but oddly enough, there’s a very good chance you’ve never heard of it. This fate all too often befalls bright, colorful, fun-oriented games that don’t adhere to the industry’s grim rigor. Well, except for the ones that feature Pokémon.
Revenge of the Wild Planet takes the explosively bright and cheerful nature of the original and makes it bigger, brighter, livelier, switches to third person, and uses it all to tell a satirical parable about the state of modern capitalism and the gaming industry.
There is a reason for this latter turn of events. Developers Raccoon Logic, who were once developers Typhoon Studios, have been through a lot. At the height of Google’s extravagant and overconfident plans for the disastrous Stadia streaming service, the company bought Typhoon as an internal developer before unceremoniously “spitting us out” (as co-founder Alex Hutchinson, former creative director of Far Cry 4 And Assassin’s Creed III says during our hands-on demo) a few months later. To secure the rights to their Savage Planet IP, they sold the first game to publisher 505 Games so they didn’t get a penny of the revenue, and… well, you can see why the game is described as “set in a future gone awry due to corporate greed and stupidity.”
So it is quite a triumph that both Hutchinson and co-founder Reid Schneider (executive producer of Mad Max, Arkham OriginsAnd Army of Two) stated that this new, far larger and more ambitious sequel will be self-published.
Like the original game, Return to the wild planet is a sprawling 3D Metroidvania set on a wacky planet (or four planets, in this case) populated by wonderfully bizarre creatures that you can shoot or kick or, this time, capture and bring to your base to keep in pens and, er, experiment on.
In the same universe but a different time and setting, your space exploration company was recently purchased by a large multinational corporation, Altar, who then sent you on an exploration mission into space a hundred years away. However, after 20 years of your cryosleep, you realize that the work is “expensive and difficult, so you decide to leave the sector entirely.” Yeah, that’s not exactly subtle.
Revenge of the Wild Planet demo
When you land on the planet you came to explore, you learn that you were released 80 years ago and that all the equipment, buildings and objects you needed are scattered across different planets. As Hutchinson put it, “One thing I discovered is that satire and science fiction are never about the future, they’re always about the here and now.”
You then have to reach all that gear and collect everything you need to rebuild a spaceship so you can return to Earth and seek revenge. This is done through third-person exploration, with an ever-expanding range of abilities that allow you to reach previously unreachable ledges or break open sealed doors – you know the Metroidvania thing.
What does Savage Planet It is easy to attract attention, how simple strange it’s all there is to it. This is a game where you fight enemy creatures by squirting them with a water gun until they absorb so much liquid that they expand into giant platforms you can jump onto, or you leave sticky trails towards a variety of slimes (here, translucent cubes with an abundance of rolling googly eyes) and then light them on fire, which could accidentally incinerate a bigger, more vicious beast that wakes up another bunch of critters, and suddenly you’re fighting with wild attacks before running, jumping, and sliding on your knees to get out of trouble.
As you play, more planets are unlocked, each with their own biomes and unique groups of creatures. You also collect parts to build and upgrade your own home, and decorate it with furniture and items sent to you by Altar. Their defining feature is that they’re all completely impractical and functionally useless. (Pretty ingeniously, you have to buy these with currency you find while exploring. Altar still takes your money for pointless stuff, but makes no attempt to save you.) At one point, you explore an entire small village of makeshift homes that were once intended for those who were supposed to follow you, and are now never inhabited.
During the demo played by the game’s lead producer, chaos often reigned, adding to the sequel’s appeal. And that chaos is apparently even more fun in the new co-op modes, whether you’re playing it remotely or in split-screen, where your buddy getting you into a lot of trouble will trigger the real fights. But the important thing is that these are escapeable situations, not amusing game overs.
The third person view has necessitated a few changes, the main one being that you can no longer punch everything in the game, which just didn’t work in this new perspective. Instead, you can now kick everything. It also features a ton of new visual gags, not least the absolutely hilarious jogging and running animations with ridiculously thrusting arms and legs, which made me laugh every time I saw them. There will also be a collection of suits to wear, with each one coming dangerously close to the IP of the others. After nerdily making a Star Trek VI Hutchinson’s reference to the fact that some of the enemies had their testicles on their knees, he asked for a Star Trek red shirt uniform. I asked why the character wasn’t killed immediately. Before the question was finished, Hutchinson interrupted me and said, “You will at launch! Put on this outfit and you’ll be dead instantly! Before we bring you back to life so you can continue.” This new perspective was also chosen because it better suited the platforming gameplay, not just for fun.
Speaking of which, the 30-person company (“How do you manage not to let the team get even bigger?” I asked. “By not having any money,” Alex Hutchinson replied) puts the well-being of its developers above the production of the game. There has been no crisis, and there are no plans to ever have one, although the last six months of development will likely test that resolve. But this is a company that has risen like a phoenix from the ashes of corporate idiocy and seems determined to now do things its own way. To be clear: It’s not normal in this industry to be so honest about its disastrous interactions with giant companies, and the freedom to do so is clearly reveled in.
From my short but extremely entertaining insights into Return to the wild planetit seems like this is channeled forever, the larger themes containing the satirical venom, no amount of nastiness reaching the game’s gleeful silliness and rock-solid moment-to-moment action. Unless, uh, look, I’m really not sure what they meant by experiments on captive creatures.
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