Journey to the Savage Planet is a first-person Metroidvania from 2020 that sold quite well and was absolutely fantastic if you played it, but oddly enough, there’s a very good chance you’ve never heard of it. That’s a fate all too often reserved for glowing, colorful, fun games that refuse to obey the industry’s furrowed brow of grim austerity. Well, except for the Pokémon ones.
Revenge of the Savage Planet takes the explosively glowing and cheerful nature of the original, makes it bigger, brighter, more exuberant, switches to a third-person narrative, and then uses it all to tell a satirical parable about the state of up-to-date capitalism and the games industry.
There’s a reason for this latest twist. Developers Raccoon Logic, who used to be Typhoon Studios developers, have been through some shit. At the height of Google’s extravagant and insanely confident plans for its disastrous Stadia streaming service, the company bought Typhoon as an internal developer before unceremoniously “spitting us back out” (in the words of co-founder Alex Hutchinson, a former innovative director at Far Cry 4 AND Assassin’s Creed III says during our hands-on demonstration) a few months later. In order to retain the rights to their Wild Planet IP, they sold the first game to publisher 505 Games so they don’t see a penny from its sales, and… well, you can see why the game bills itself as being set “in a future unhinged by corporate greed and stupidity.”
So it was with some triumph that both Hutchinson and co-founder Reid Schneider (executive producer Mad Max, Arkham OriginsAND Army of Two) has stated that this up-to-date, much bigger and more ambitious sequel will be self-published.
Much like the original game, Return to Planet Savage is a sprawling, 3D metroidvania set on a crazy planet (or in this case, four planets) inhabited by wonderfully weird creatures that you can shoot at, kick, and this time, catch and take back to your base, keep in pens, and, um, experiment on.
The action takes place in the same universe, but in a different time and setting. Your space exploration company has recently been bought by a huge multinational corporation, Altar, who send you on a deep space exploration mission a hundred years away. However, after 20 years of cryogenic sleep, you realize that the job is “expensive and difficult, so you decide to leave the sector altogether.” Yeah, that’s not exactly subtle.
Revenge of the Savage Planet demonstration
When you land on the planet you were supposed to explore, you find out that you were fired 80 years ago, and all the equipment, buildings, and items you needed have been scattered across different planets. As Hutchinson says, “One thing I’ve discovered is that satire and science fiction are never about the future, they’re always about the present.”
Then you have to get to all that gear and gather everything you need to rebuild your spaceship and return to Earth for revenge. This is done through third-person exploration, with an ever-expanding set of abilities that let you reach previously impossible ledges or break down sealed doors—you know the Metroidvania drill.
What makes Wild Planet standing out is just that elementary weird everything is. It’s a game where you fight enemy creatures by squirting them with a squirt gun until they absorb so much liquid that they grow into huge platforms you can jump on, or you leave a trail of goo in the direction of a bunch of oozes (here, see-through cubes containing a bunch of swirling, bulging eyes) and then set them on fire, which can accidentally burn a bigger, more vicious beast that will wake up another group of creatures, and suddenly you’re scrambling to deal with a crazy attack before running, jumping, and sliding on your knees to get out of trouble.
As you play, more planets with their own biomes and unique sets of creatures will be unlocked. You’ll also collect parts to build and upgrade your own home, decorating it with furniture and items sent to you by Altar, the defining characteristic of which is that they’re all completely impractical and functionally useless. (Ingeniously, you have to buy these with currency found during exploration; Altar is still willing to take your money for pointless trinkets, but make no attempt to rescue you.) At one point, you’ll explore an entire miniature village of short-lived homes, once intended for those who would come after you, now never to be filled.
The demo, which featured the game’s lead producer, was often confused, which only added to the charm of the sequel. And that chaos is apparently even more enjoyable in the up-to-date co-op modes, whether you’re playing remotely or split-screen, where your buddy fools around and gets you into a ton of trouble, which makes for all the right kinds of fights. But importantly, these are situations you can escape from, not amusing game-endings.
The third-person view needed a few changes. The most crucial one is that you can no longer punch everything in the game, which simply didn’t work in this up-to-date perspective. Now you can kick everything. It also features a ton of up-to-date visual gags, not least the absolutely hilarious running and jogging animations with ridiculously flailing arms and legs that made me laugh every time I saw them. There will also be a collection of wearable suits, each dangerously close to the others’ IP. After noticing Star Trek VI referring to the point Hutchinson made about some enemies having gonads on their knees, he asked for Star Trek red shirt uniform. I asked why the character wasn’t killed immediately? Before the question could be finished, Hutchinson interrupted me, saying, “You’ll be killed on startup! Put this outfit on and you’ll die immediately! Before we bring you back to life so you can continue playing.” This up-to-date perspective was also chosen because it was better suited to a platformer, not just for fun.
And speaking of which, the 30-person company (“How do you keep your team from growing?” I asked. “Without money,” Alex Hutchinson replied) puts the well-being of its developers ahead of producing the game. There’s been no crunch, and there are no plans to ever have any, although entering the final six months of development will likely test that resolve. But this is a company that rose like a phoenix from the ashes of corporate idiocy and seems determined to do things on its own terms now. Let’s be clear: it’s not normal in this industry to be this open about disastrous interactions with giant corporations, and the freedom to do so is clearly relished.
From my tiny but extremely amusing glances Return to Planet Savageit seems like it’s being passed around for the sake of it, the larger themes containing satirical vitriol without the malice reaching for the gleeful silliness and solid moment-to-moment action of playing the game. Unless, err, look, I’m really not sure what they meant by experimenting on captured creatures.
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