Planet of Lana Review (drumdrone)
This game can be summed up as:
"Mom can we play Inside?"
"No honey we have Inside at home"
Inside at home:
I am almost completely 50/50 for loving/hating this game.
Pros:
Absolutely gorgeous game. Provides an immense sense of scale, with towering titanic enemies moving past in the distance, and beautiful vistas stretching to the horizon. Absolutely wonderful to look at.
The lore is sparse but very interesting and immediately understandable through very little communication, which is very impressive and well done. This is very much a "show not tell" game.
You can pet the companion, which is always nice, and overall the game has a very cute feel to it.
The cons:
The character has only one speed of movement, and it's not agonizingly slow but it's far from fast. This game desperately needed a sprint button. The enemies are all much much faster than you, which if done well can heighten the tension of a game, but unfortunately instead of tension I got frustration. There were also multiple periods of just walking and looking at the background, (including an odd out of place 4 minute music interlude) no puzzles, no interaction, just hold the left joystick to the right. Get ready to hold that left joystick to the right *a lot*. With how simple a lot of the puzzles are this game is almost a walking simulator.
There's a ton of puzzles that require almost frame perfect timing, and with your character's movement speed, enemy patrol patterns and save points, those three elements often combine to equal waiting for upwards of 30 to 40 seconds to retry a frame perfect moment, missing, dying and getting reset and having to wait 30 to 40 seconds for another chance at a frame perfect moment.
None of the puzzles were *super* complex, but were however difficult to solve due to timing and platforming. This often led to me having solved the puzzle logically in my head, but then needing to execute in real time, and dying over and over due to requiring frame perfect jumps or timing enemy patrols.
There was a huge amount of repetition, it seemed like they made you send the companion up a cliff to toss down a rope to you at least 30 different times.
If it were longer than it is I wouldn't recommend it. But if you get it on sale it's fun to kill an afternoon, if a little tedious and frustrating. But I'd rather play Inside.