I’m not sure why this game is called Lifeless Planet, when (without wishing to spoil), life is found within five minutes of exploration. I suppose ‘Planet With a Bit of Life’ doesn’t have as much of a ring to it.

Despite the misnomer of the title, the protagonist, a slightly tubby man in a space-suit, crash lands on a mysterious and seemingly lifeless planet, only to discover the ruins of a Soviet Russian settlement. The planet is many light-years away from earth, so the question is: how did the Soviet’s get there?

Lifeless Planet is a game relentlessly focused on exploration. The spaceman is dumped on the planet and simply has to traverse the dead, desert-like terrain in search of his crew-mates and anything that might help him return home. All the while, his oxygen supplies steadily deplete, along with his questionable sanity.

As well as jogging to explore the landscape, the protagonist also has a jet-pack. Unfortunately, for most of the game all the jet-pack does is give him a meager boost to help prolong jumps. At certain times through-out the game, the player is given more jet-pack fuel, allowing them to buzz around the planet, making travelling far more enjoyable. However, the fuel is then arbitrarily taken away as if the developer is saying “OK, you’ve had your fun. Now get back to the grind. This is a serious game after all”.

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Without the jet-pack boost, the exploration does get boring. Half an hour into the game and the player will already have grown tired of the beige environments. Four hours in and the player will be inventing little games just to keep the endless repetition from grating.

What the environments lack is a sense of scale. There’s a feeling that I got when playing Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, which made me feel insignificant yet full of wonder at the vast world I was scuttling around in. Lifeless Planet feels surprisingly hemmed in in-comparison.

Even though the planet is vast, and does sprawl out on all sides, it feels small and boxy. Perhaps it’s because the game only had one developer, and he didn’t have the resources to flesh the environments out. Perhaps that also explains why the game looks like it could have been released over ten years ago.

It’s wrong to criticize a developer for not having the means that larger game devs have, but even without wads of cash, I still feel something could have done to bring this game to life. The planet is completely lacking in detail, making it an endless slog of brown dust. I, for one, want to be amazed at the opportunity of being able to traverse a strange alien world.

It’s a shame that the environments are so lacking in imagination, because Lifeless Planet tells an intelligent and relevant story about the consequences of relentless human expansion. The entire planet is an enigma, and I wanted to get to the bottom of it. I stuck at the boring exploration just so I could reveal the game’s secrets, which is a testament to its narrative.

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I’d say that it’s worth playing Lifeless Planet just to be told a good story, but honestly I’m not sure if that’s the case, as the gameplay is so lacking. To spice things up, as the game progresses the spaceman finds a gangly robot arm that he can use to solve puzzles. Puzzles that involve picking green orbs and placing them in green-orb holders. Puzzles during which the only challenge is getting to grips with the incredibly annoying control scheme.

Thinking of puzzles, there was more than one occasion where I got completely stuck because I assumed that there was some kind of clever solution involving angles of trajectory and timing, but I didn’t notice that there was just a badly rendered button that I needed to push to progress.

Through-out the game, the player will stumble upon masses of flavour text that really add some much needed colour to the game, but for some reason, the developer saw fit to give the protagonist and some of the characters contributing to the flavour text voices. Employing voice actors to occasionally say “What happened here?” or “That’s my ticket home” was just pointless and detracted from the atmosphere the game was trying to hard to impose.

At times, I found myself sucked in by the atmosphere. Particularly when the lonesome astronaut hallucinates whilst stumbling aimless of a planet potentially full of unknown threats. There’s a decent horror game lurking beneath all that beige.

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But instead, we got a dull, surprisingly linear exploration game that tells an interesting story in the least interesting way possible, like having a very boring man perform Hamlet with sock puppets.

4/10

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