Planet of Lana Review (TheGuyda)
I wanted to like this game, and judging by the player reviews, you might like it yourself. And if so, great. But I do want to say that how much you like this game might depend on your experience with other cinematic platformers and other tearjerker games.
Basically, this is a standard game of its genre, except the puzzles are simpler (I was stumped only once), there are a bit too many "keep running to the right while you see scenery, for dramatic effect" moments for my liking, and it tries to jerk tears in predictable ways involving an alien that you adopt as a pet, which follows you around and becomes required for puzzle solving. (If it dies, you lose.) Can you guess what happens to the alien later? Yup. Can you guess what happens AFTER that happens? Yup.
But if you've never played a cinematic platformer before, or a game which tries to jerk tears, then this is a good place to start. Because it still does these things well enough. Graphics are beautiful and downright stunning at times. The story is told through the environment and occasionally cutscenes without dialog that only zoom in the camera, if that, as the characters emote through animation. The camera freezes in place when in a puzzle or action zone to fit all of it on the screen, until it's completed, which is a feature I really like: basically, the camera moves when you're traveling, but stops to show everything that's important when you need to solve a puzzle or evade an enemy. Being a cinematic platformer, you move almost like a real human, with movement limited to climbing and dropping down, jumping only as high as a real (albeit athletic) person, and pulling and pushing things - or controlling other things remotely. And giving commands to your pet, for the game's many puzzles which require the two of you to work together.
It's a competently made cinematic platformer that tries to make you cry a few times. But I've played games that actually jerked real tears, and this one just made me roll my eyes in annoyance and think, "I get it, it's supposed to be sad." That's not their developers' intended effect, but I'm sorry, the storytelling just didn't work for me. I never felt attached to Mui, the little animal you adopt for a few hours. And I know everyone talks in a made-up language, but their language seems to have like ten words total, which I also find hard to take seriously.
So, just keep in mind what you're getting if you decide to buy this. If my complaints are about things that wouldn't bother you, then hey, buy this game and enjoy it more than I did.