‘Journey to the Savage Planet’ is a drug-induced Metroid: Review

Tell me, gamespeople: What’s your level of interest in stumbling across adorable, cooing, soccer ball-shaped alien birds… that you can kick into the hungry spinning blade jaws of a similarly alien plant with one, hungry eye?

That’s something you can and, in fact, must do in Typhoon Studios’ debut, Journey to the Savage Planet. Honestly, it’s better if I just show you. Take a look.

Image: typhoon studios – gif by mashable

In addition to being hilarious, that poor spacebird’s death served a purpose. The freshly sated buzzsaw plant went to sleep, causing the vines that were blocking my path forward to melt away. It’s an early example of the kinds of environmental puzzles that constantly spring up as you explore Journey‘s untamed world.

The titular “savage planet” is a colorful and lively place, filled with fantastical alien creatures and plant life. You take it all in from a first-person perspective, though it’s dishonest to call the game a “shooter.” Yes, you have a space gun, and yes, you sometimes do shoot things with it. There are staged fights and even the odd boss encounter to push through.

Combat may be the weakest piece in Journey to the Savage Planet‘s package, however. Most of the aliens you’re forced to fight are fast-moving critters with tiny, glowing weak points that are usually found on or close to their butts. It’s an amusing idea that’s frustrating in practice as the more aggressive beasties have a habit of running circles around you and (smartly!) keeping their posteriors protected.

You start with a few tools that slow their pace or serve as distractions, but the game isn’t great about filling you in on the purpose and uses of your equipment. Even in the latest stages of my 20-plus hour playtime I was still confounded by the challenge of killing creatures that I’d been running into since the earliest parts of the game.

I never felt the thrill of combat…  because most of the time I was just happy to finally move on from these annoying moments.

I think it’s because Journey to the Savage Planet‘s idea of a challenging fight depends so much on making it nearly impossible to aim at the thing you need to shoot. Sometimes the thing in question attacks too quickly, leaving you disoriented; other times its attack pattern has you spinning in circles as you try to line up a shot. 

These moments are more frustrating than challenging, and they’re rarely satisfying. I never felt the thrill of combat from Journey to the Savage Planet because most of the time I was just happy to finally move on from these annoying moments. Thankfully, combat makes up a relatively small piece of the game.

Most of your exploration is driven by environmental puzzles that block your progress, like the buzzsaw plant. You’re generally trying to work your way up, up, up, to a distant stone tower that represents clear evidence of intelligent life on AR-Y 26. In practice, this means advancing through a series of discrete and somewhat trope-y regions.

There’s the icy area, the forest-y area, the alien-poison-and-giant-mushrooms area, the floating stone islands area… you get the idea. You can visit all of these locations freely as soon as you find the tools to reach them, and therein lies the rub.

You’re not really in the best shape after a crash landing that lays the story’s groundwork. Everything you’d need to survive and thrive on a hostile alien world is broken and missing key pieces. Fortunately for you, the ship has machines that can make use of alien elements and fix your broken gear. You just have to get out and find those elements.

That general loop defines the entire game. Early on, for example, you’ll come across cracked stone walls barring the entrance to caves and shimmering gooey overhangs that seem like they’d play nice with a grappling hook. (Spoiler alert: It’s true, they would!) Scan them and EKO will pin down the location of whatever element you’re missing and give you a new objective marker to follow.

Each of these sub-missions revolve around some kind of puzzle that introduces the tool you’ll soon unlock. Once you’ve got the thing, whether it’s a grapple or a bomb plant (or something else….), the world you’re able to access opens up a little more. By the end, you’re a high-flying space explorer with a jump-assisting jetpack, an assortment of elemental bombs, and a souped-up grapple.

If you’re an old-school Nintendo gamer and reading all of this is giving you Metroid flashbacks, you’re on the right track. The character you commandeer is nowhere near as cool as Samus Aran and the subversive vibe of the humor couldn’t feel more different from the earlier NES game’s sterile and story-lite delivery. But the tool-dependent puzzles really create the sense that you’re mapping out an alien world, and slowly opening up a variety of routes back to more familiar terrain in the process.

All of this exploration is happening on behalf of Kindred Aerospace, the fourth best interstellar exploration company. The various live-action ads and messages from your boss (viewable aboard your ship) tout this “fourth best” status proudly, as if it’s a badge of honor. But in reality, Kindred kind of sucks. 

Your ship is inoperable after the crash, but Kindred’s only interest is the mission. They can’t (read: won’t) help you, so you need to help yourself by getting out and exploring. Kindred wants you to gather all the data you can; as much as you might be tempted to ignore the order, there’s a shared interest here. Gathering data and running science experiments from your mission log not only leads you to new tools, it also allows you to upgrade the tools you already have.

Journey to the Savage Planet tries to blend the Metroid vibes with a biting sense of humor, but I wouldn’t say it succeeds.

Journey to the Savage Planet tries to blend the Metroid-y gameplay vibes with a biting sense of humor, but I wouldn’t say it entirely succeeds on that count. EKO is certainly an entertaining companion, with a dry sense of humor that’s reminiscent of GLaDOS, from Portal. But she’s not nearly as funny as that classic video game villain.

That relegates the best source of capital-J jokes to your ship’s TV and the growing storehouse of commercials and video messages from Kindred corporate. These things are always playing when you’re on the ship, and you can even choose ones you want to watch from a menu in the ship’s computer. They’re fun! But there’s nothing to play there. It’s just… watching TV.

The planet outside your ship is more subtle with its humor. Just look at the example of the buzzsaw plant and the porg-like spacebirds it loves to eat. I laughed. You’ll laugh. There are other things like that to laugh at. It’s just too bad there’s not more. 

That’s not a knock on the art, which is generally beautiful and popping with colors that coordinate and clash strategically. It’s a joy to work through Journey to the Savage Planet if only because you get to see the many visual delights of AR-Y 26. But the sense of humor that runs through the heart of this game doesn’t exactly manage to permeate every frame. For every spacebird you kick into a hungry plant’s teeth or sentry flower that you sneak up on and poke in its one giant eye (that’s a true thing), there’s a dozen more baddies that you simply… shoot. Woo hoo?

Not really, but that’s OK. After a few hours of wandering around on AR Y-26 and soaking in the weird lore you uncover as you point your scanner every which way, a buzzy sense of contentment sets in. Even the shipboard TV ads start to make sense. If you live in a place where recreational weed is on the menu, this is the perfect accompaniment to your bake session. Plop down in front of the virtual TV, get lifted, and wander back out into a hostile alien landscape filled with bright colors and trippy flora and fauna.

Journey to the Savage Planet doesn’t strike me as the kind of game that’s going to generate tons and tons of thoughtful discourse. It’s a silly and (frustrating combat bits aside) relatively low-stress space adventure with an irreverent sense of humor and lots of pretty colors. 

To paraphrase Jon Stewart’s standout moment in the Hollywood classic Half-Baked: “Have you ever played Metroid… on weed??” Well, now you can – and the weed is optional.