Journey to the Savage Planet - Racclog #5
There’s nothing wrong with pinching a bit of DNA from the greats. Not only is the idea of every game being an evolution rather than an iteration kind of exhausting for devs and players alike, but iteration is how we’ve gotten some of the best games of our time. Forza is basically Xbox’s Gran Turismo but with a vinyl editor, Sleeping Dogs and Saints Row have Grand Theft Auto beat in many areas, and - relevant to the game at hand - Metroid and Castlevania were the games that launched a thousand, erm, Metroidvanias. But you gotta add your own flair. You gotta do something with it.
I have no idea what Journey to the Savage Planet really does.
Journey to the Savage Planet
Right from the offset, Journey to the Savage Planet tries to carve a standout identity for itself, albeit kind of a dated one, as you awaken in a tiny ship and a screen plays a zany lol random introductory FMV cutscene. You’re an unnamed employee of Kindred, the “4th best Interstellar Exploration Company,” tasked with surveying an unexplored planet to determine if it’s fit for human occupation. Your destination is ARY-26, a colourful planet teeming with wildlife, that appears to exist largely as a series of floating islands, but only minutes after landing, you discover a huge tower and other structures determinant of civilization. This is at odds of Kindred’s knowledge of the planet thus far, and you must investigate the tower to find out who was previously here, and why they were here previously instead of currently.
A basic, but intriguing setup, and one that would absolutely kick ass if they did anything interesting with it. I would, of course, not be saying this if they had indeed done anything interesting with it. It kind of is, at first, as you survey various vivid plants and observe the wildlife, from the friendly and puntable pufferbirds (literally, punting them is an occasionally required gameplay mechanic) to weird little lizards that run around and scream endlessly when startled. It’s strange, it’s silly, and it’s just off-kilter enough to nab my interest.
Delightfully, the game starts off by leaning into this, giving you areas to explore at your own pace rather than direct you too hard. There is direction - you have a main goal, and there are waypoint markers and a compass at the top of the screen - but you’re still free to explore and take in the strange scenery at your own pace. Your AI helper only ever speaks at pivotal moments and when scanning certain flora and fauna, so there’s no one really in your ear telling you to hurry your slow ass up. Even better - or worse depending on who you ask - there’s no map whatsoever, so you often have to rely on your own recollection when backtracking. The feeling of mostly-unguided exploration is great.
Thus, the main gameplay loop sets in. Explore the planet, find an impassable obstacle, find the thing to pass it, then use your 3D printer and your amassed materials to craft said thing back on your ship. Upgrades range from a double jump to a grappling tether to a good old fashioned ground pound, and will not only unlock the critical path but open up many new paths to explore in previous areas.
One particular mechanic has you picking up various seeds and fruits with different combat and puzzle-solving applications. Some are basic - one is for all intents and purposes a grenade, another is sticky bile (purple poo) that holds enemies in place. Others are vastly more interesting, and it was when the game asked me to use these that I found myself having the most fun. One seed transforms into a pile of goop you can bounce on to reach high areas, and these seeds can be carried and placed wherever you like (although they are rendered obsolete by jump upgrades later on). Another can be thrown at any walls with barnacles and becomes a grappling point upon contact, and the areas these are used in often require a decent bit of thought as to where to throw them despite the imposed limitation. This, and several other platforming-focused areas, is Savage Planet at its peak.
I can’t quite pinpoint where the game started to lose me, though. The aforementioned bit with the grapple seeds was pretty late in the game so I was still finding pockets of enjoyment here and there but I think, sometime near the end of the second of three areas, I realised I wasn’t interested in the world at all. The company that employed me, the state of the human race, the mystery surrounding the titular planet. I just didn’t care, and I think it’s because Savage Planet feels like it doesn’t care, either.
There’s a tongue-in-cheek vibe to the whole thing. Your ship plays advertisements from a dating service for gelatinous creatures to the Wedgie Burger restaurant that uses freshly ground-up vegans, all in the name of replicating that sorta “hehe capitalism is so zany and awful” vibe that games such as Ratchet & Clank and Borderlands strive for, and at least for me, a lot of the humour fell flat on its face. This isn’t helped by your AI assistant who spews sarcastic lines about how you can be reprinted after death with the kind of delivery you’d expect from a stuck-up coworker in an office sitcom.
I have no idea what Journey to the Savage Planet really does.
Journey to the Savage Planet
Year: 2020
Genre: FPS, Metroidvania
Developer: Typhoon Studios
Publisher: 505 Games
Played on: PC
Also on: PS4, Xbox One, Switch, (Employee of the Month edition on PS5, Series X|S and Stadia (lol))
My Playtime: 7 hours
Right from the offset, Journey to the Savage Planet tries to carve a standout identity for itself, albeit kind of a dated one, as you awaken in a tiny ship and a screen plays a zany lol random introductory FMV cutscene. You’re an unnamed employee of Kindred, the “4th best Interstellar Exploration Company,” tasked with surveying an unexplored planet to determine if it’s fit for human occupation. Your destination is ARY-26, a colourful planet teeming with wildlife, that appears to exist largely as a series of floating islands, but only minutes after landing, you discover a huge tower and other structures determinant of civilization. This is at odds of Kindred’s knowledge of the planet thus far, and you must investigate the tower to find out who was previously here, and why they were here previously instead of currently.A basic, but intriguing setup, and one that would absolutely kick ass if they did anything interesting with it. I would, of course, not be saying this if they had indeed done anything interesting with it. It kind of is, at first, as you survey various vivid plants and observe the wildlife, from the friendly and puntable pufferbirds (literally, punting them is an occasionally required gameplay mechanic) to weird little lizards that run around and scream endlessly when startled. It’s strange, it’s silly, and it’s just off-kilter enough to nab my interest.
Delightfully, the game starts off by leaning into this, giving you areas to explore at your own pace rather than direct you too hard. There is direction - you have a main goal, and there are waypoint markers and a compass at the top of the screen - but you’re still free to explore and take in the strange scenery at your own pace. Your AI helper only ever speaks at pivotal moments and when scanning certain flora and fauna, so there’s no one really in your ear telling you to hurry your slow ass up. Even better - or worse depending on who you ask - there’s no map whatsoever, so you often have to rely on your own recollection when backtracking. The feeling of mostly-unguided exploration is great.
Thus, the main gameplay loop sets in. Explore the planet, find an impassable obstacle, find the thing to pass it, then use your 3D printer and your amassed materials to craft said thing back on your ship. Upgrades range from a double jump to a grappling tether to a good old fashioned ground pound, and will not only unlock the critical path but open up many new paths to explore in previous areas.
One particular mechanic has you picking up various seeds and fruits with different combat and puzzle-solving applications. Some are basic - one is for all intents and purposes a grenade, another is sticky bile (purple poo) that holds enemies in place. Others are vastly more interesting, and it was when the game asked me to use these that I found myself having the most fun. One seed transforms into a pile of goop you can bounce on to reach high areas, and these seeds can be carried and placed wherever you like (although they are rendered obsolete by jump upgrades later on). Another can be thrown at any walls with barnacles and becomes a grappling point upon contact, and the areas these are used in often require a decent bit of thought as to where to throw them despite the imposed limitation. This, and several other platforming-focused areas, is Savage Planet at its peak.
I can’t quite pinpoint where the game started to lose me, though. The aforementioned bit with the grapple seeds was pretty late in the game so I was still finding pockets of enjoyment here and there but I think, sometime near the end of the second of three areas, I realised I wasn’t interested in the world at all. The company that employed me, the state of the human race, the mystery surrounding the titular planet. I just didn’t care, and I think it’s because Savage Planet feels like it doesn’t care, either.
There’s a tongue-in-cheek vibe to the whole thing. Your ship plays advertisements from a dating service for gelatinous creatures to the Wedgie Burger restaurant that uses freshly ground-up vegans, all in the name of replicating that sorta “hehe capitalism is so zany and awful” vibe that games such as Ratchet & Clank and Borderlands strive for, and at least for me, a lot of the humour fell flat on its face. This isn’t helped by your AI assistant who spews sarcastic lines about how you can be reprinted after death with the kind of delivery you’d expect from a stuck-up coworker in an office sitcom.
Admittedly the one gag that did get me was at the start of the game where you pick a portrait of yourself as part of an introductory survey, and one of the options is a dog. I brushed this off thinking this was just a silly thing, only to start giggling and snorting when my character panted as they ran and audibly yelped when they were knocked back during a cutscene.
Regardless, it's hard to get invested in the planet itself when the game seems to treat the idea of worldbuilding as a joke. Flying fish? Cool! Why is the game so fixated on the fact that they can poop on you? For that matter, why is the final level filled with lava(?)-emitting buttholes? No exaggeration, the very first thing you see upon entering the area is a butthole on the ceiling. This isn’t even regarding the kapyenas, critters I was immediately smitten by, only to immediately not give a shit when the AI lady told me the glowing weak points on their tails were, in fact, their genitalia.
(Feel free to skip the following paragraph if you plan on playing the game, as it will contain spoilers for the final boss and the big reveal.)
It was the ending that ultimately evaporated any dwindling interest I’d had in the story. It’s very generic - the tower is filled with pods to preserve life on the planet if anything happens to the people that lived there. Okay. Cool. Awesome. This would be a fine reveal if there were anything else in the game that really alluded to it. You find structures and shrines, but there really is no story throughout the game until the very moment you step into the tower itself, six to eight hours later.
Fair play, I did not acquire enough fuel to leave the planet and achieve any ending past simply defeating the final boss, but I doubt any ending would have suddenly shifted my interest back from “shrug” to “ooh!” There was no reason for me to be invested. Creatures are just kinda plopped down wherever, and discoveries are treated as jokes, from your AI companion having to throw out quips about every second thing you scan to important places being named things like “Chamber of Intrigue.” It doesn’t invoke the same curiosity I had when recently playing Super Metroid for the first time recently, where I’d stumble into new areas, encounter enemies and observe the architecture to piece together things for myself. It was half the reason I was so engrossed in it - I wanted to see what was next! Here, that feeling was absent.
Comparing Savage Planet to one of the genre’s forefathers is probably a little mean, but the mystery and intrigue are simply missing here. I understand they wanted to go for a comedic and satirical tone, but you can still build an interesting world while being humorous, so when everything’s plopped down into a game world without much more thought to its placement or reasoning for existence outside of level design, I struggle to get invested.
All this time, and I still haven’t mentioned the gunplay - because there really isn’t much to it. You quickly craft yourself a laser pistol with unlimited ammo upon landing on ARY-26, and beyond making use of fruits and seeds, that’s the full extent of your arsenal. It starts out with only eight rounds per clip and a reload speed longer than The Count of Tuscany, but exploring the world and collecting materials from downed enemies and mineral deposits lets you craft new upgrades for it, all of which (as far as I saw) are very basic. Shorter reload times, more rounds per clip, more damage, yada yada. Eventually you can charge up a shot and give projectiles the ability to bounce around (less bounce off things and more automatically seek out the next three or four enemies) and that’s kind of it.
Combat is designed around it, with most enemies never taking more than a couple shots to explode into Nickelodeon slime, but since there aren’t many ways to engage with enemies, this makes combat feel pretty stale even before you finish the first area. Since there aren’t any other weapons designed to take on enemies with more health, they instead up the challenge in combat with enemies having weak points; on one hand, they only show them when you successfully dodge certain attacks (turning fights into an annoying waiting game) or use certain items if you have them on you, and on the other hand, they can be weirdly annoying to hit with unnecessarily accurate hitboxes. In the case of the former, there’s a late-game enemy that does an AOE whirlwind attack that would be a cinch to avoid in any third person game, but trying to dodge it in first person is actual torture.
Combat’s passable when it’s used to punctuate exploration with the occasional group of enemies, but as the game progresses it throws you into combat scenarios more often, and it absolutely does not have the tools or mechanics to justify it. I was not expecting something like DOOM or Turbo Overkill here, but the game seems to think combat becomes more engaging simply by adding more enemies and it absolutely does not.
As a final note: no, I did not find everything, obviously. But I also didn’t feel like I needed to. The game lets you upgrade other stuff aside from your sole firearm, to help make traversal more manageable - you can turn your unlockable double jump into a triple jump (and beyond!), for example, or have your helmet ping you when certain collectibles are nearby. Eventually I stopped going out of my way for everything since I found I simply didn’t need more upgrades than I already had - the triple jump, combined with other mandatory upgrades, is more than enough to do basically everything, at least as far as finding some secrets and beating the final boss, anyway.
I was also less tempted to go for more unlocks since many of them are locked behind increasing your Explorer Rank, which is done by performing very specific tasks such as collecting living samples from enemies or making certain enemies explode and kill a certain amount of other enemies. Baiting enemies into doing so should be pretty easy with the tools you’re given but enemy behaviour can be so temperamental that it’s an utter chore to do so, let alone an exploding enemy’s radius being way smaller than the animation lets on.
I really wanted to love Journey to the Savage Planet as much as others do, well and truly. Even as bits of it irked me and the story and worldbuilding nearly completely lost me, I pressed on, hoping it would pick up as I discovered more of the planet and its tempting secrets. But it never really goes anywhere. Any intrigue is traded out for humour that only five years later already feels annoying and dated, and any commitment to exploring evaporated when I found I didn’t really need to. Though it’s colourful and vibrant and it plays plenty well enough, Journey to the Savage Planet as a Metroidvania is bland and uninviting - but there IS something here, and I only hope its potential was realised in its recent third-person sequel, Revenge of the Savage Planet.
PROS:
Regardless, it's hard to get invested in the planet itself when the game seems to treat the idea of worldbuilding as a joke. Flying fish? Cool! Why is the game so fixated on the fact that they can poop on you? For that matter, why is the final level filled with lava(?)-emitting buttholes? No exaggeration, the very first thing you see upon entering the area is a butthole on the ceiling. This isn’t even regarding the kapyenas, critters I was immediately smitten by, only to immediately not give a shit when the AI lady told me the glowing weak points on their tails were, in fact, their genitalia.
(Feel free to skip the following paragraph if you plan on playing the game, as it will contain spoilers for the final boss and the big reveal.)
It was the ending that ultimately evaporated any dwindling interest I’d had in the story. It’s very generic - the tower is filled with pods to preserve life on the planet if anything happens to the people that lived there. Okay. Cool. Awesome. This would be a fine reveal if there were anything else in the game that really alluded to it. You find structures and shrines, but there really is no story throughout the game until the very moment you step into the tower itself, six to eight hours later.
Fair play, I did not acquire enough fuel to leave the planet and achieve any ending past simply defeating the final boss, but I doubt any ending would have suddenly shifted my interest back from “shrug” to “ooh!” There was no reason for me to be invested. Creatures are just kinda plopped down wherever, and discoveries are treated as jokes, from your AI companion having to throw out quips about every second thing you scan to important places being named things like “Chamber of Intrigue.” It doesn’t invoke the same curiosity I had when recently playing Super Metroid for the first time recently, where I’d stumble into new areas, encounter enemies and observe the architecture to piece together things for myself. It was half the reason I was so engrossed in it - I wanted to see what was next! Here, that feeling was absent.
Comparing Savage Planet to one of the genre’s forefathers is probably a little mean, but the mystery and intrigue are simply missing here. I understand they wanted to go for a comedic and satirical tone, but you can still build an interesting world while being humorous, so when everything’s plopped down into a game world without much more thought to its placement or reasoning for existence outside of level design, I struggle to get invested.
All this time, and I still haven’t mentioned the gunplay - because there really isn’t much to it. You quickly craft yourself a laser pistol with unlimited ammo upon landing on ARY-26, and beyond making use of fruits and seeds, that’s the full extent of your arsenal. It starts out with only eight rounds per clip and a reload speed longer than The Count of Tuscany, but exploring the world and collecting materials from downed enemies and mineral deposits lets you craft new upgrades for it, all of which (as far as I saw) are very basic. Shorter reload times, more rounds per clip, more damage, yada yada. Eventually you can charge up a shot and give projectiles the ability to bounce around (less bounce off things and more automatically seek out the next three or four enemies) and that’s kind of it.
Combat is designed around it, with most enemies never taking more than a couple shots to explode into Nickelodeon slime, but since there aren’t many ways to engage with enemies, this makes combat feel pretty stale even before you finish the first area. Since there aren’t any other weapons designed to take on enemies with more health, they instead up the challenge in combat with enemies having weak points; on one hand, they only show them when you successfully dodge certain attacks (turning fights into an annoying waiting game) or use certain items if you have them on you, and on the other hand, they can be weirdly annoying to hit with unnecessarily accurate hitboxes. In the case of the former, there’s a late-game enemy that does an AOE whirlwind attack that would be a cinch to avoid in any third person game, but trying to dodge it in first person is actual torture.
Combat’s passable when it’s used to punctuate exploration with the occasional group of enemies, but as the game progresses it throws you into combat scenarios more often, and it absolutely does not have the tools or mechanics to justify it. I was not expecting something like DOOM or Turbo Overkill here, but the game seems to think combat becomes more engaging simply by adding more enemies and it absolutely does not.
As a final note: no, I did not find everything, obviously. But I also didn’t feel like I needed to. The game lets you upgrade other stuff aside from your sole firearm, to help make traversal more manageable - you can turn your unlockable double jump into a triple jump (and beyond!), for example, or have your helmet ping you when certain collectibles are nearby. Eventually I stopped going out of my way for everything since I found I simply didn’t need more upgrades than I already had - the triple jump, combined with other mandatory upgrades, is more than enough to do basically everything, at least as far as finding some secrets and beating the final boss, anyway.
I was also less tempted to go for more unlocks since many of them are locked behind increasing your Explorer Rank, which is done by performing very specific tasks such as collecting living samples from enemies or making certain enemies explode and kill a certain amount of other enemies. Baiting enemies into doing so should be pretty easy with the tools you’re given but enemy behaviour can be so temperamental that it’s an utter chore to do so, let alone an exploding enemy’s radius being way smaller than the animation lets on.
I really wanted to love Journey to the Savage Planet as much as others do, well and truly. Even as bits of it irked me and the story and worldbuilding nearly completely lost me, I pressed on, hoping it would pick up as I discovered more of the planet and its tempting secrets. But it never really goes anywhere. Any intrigue is traded out for humour that only five years later already feels annoying and dated, and any commitment to exploring evaporated when I found I didn’t really need to. Though it’s colourful and vibrant and it plays plenty well enough, Journey to the Savage Planet as a Metroidvania is bland and uninviting - but there IS something here, and I only hope its potential was realised in its recent third-person sequel, Revenge of the Savage Planet.
PROS:
- Vibrant visuals
- At its best when you’re scanning and exploring the environment
- Laid back difficulty is inviting
- Some of the critters are pretty cool…
- …until your AI helper tells you their testicles are on their tails. The humour is way more miss than hit for me
- Bland storytelling. Imagine Metroid without the intrigue
- Annoying unlock methods for further upgrades
- Combat is too simple for how plentiful it is
- Breezing through the game with half the upgrades makes finding them feel pointless
VERDICT: The setting is unremarkable, the humour is a miss and upgrades feel superfluous - despite its inviting visuals, Journey to the Savage Planet gave me little reason to really want to explore the titular planet.
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