A GOO’d enough time - Journey to the Savage Planet Review
Developer: Racoon Logic (Formerly Typhoon Studios) | Platform: PS5 | Playtime: 15:05 | Platinum: 16:30
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before - I tried this game before a few years back (With my friend Sean in Co-op) and didn’t mesh with it. Retrying it now solo, there’s a perfectly okay game here if you don’t mind the game feeling a bit closer to a demo and some hit or miss humour.
You are a nameless astronaut under employ of Kindred Aerospace (The 4th best company), tasked with finding a suitable home for humanity. Your planet is ARY-26 but unfortunately you’ve crash landed. The mission must go on so alongside your surveying, you must find fuel to get you home.
That’s the top and bottom of it, not that the story is particularly relevant to the story or interesting enough to remember. Really it’s just there to facilitate the gameplay which is a metroidvania-esque collectathon. In that regard, the game is pretty fun. It’s fairly easy going, I managed to get 14 hours odd gameplay in two days thanks to the gameplay being a wee bit mindless.
Alongside the exploring, there is a combat but it’s pretty lacklustre. Limited to a pistol, enemies die in a few shots while elite enemies and the games three boss encounters rely on the age old classic of glowing yellow orbs to shoot. It’s not complicated but it does itch a certain part of the brain.
The most in/famous aspect of the game is it’s low brow humour. There’s your whiny voice robot companion who offers the occasional snark, every plant, creature and architecture scanned has a humourous description and of course there are the live action bits. The intro and ending cutscenes are done by real actors in a Devolver Digital like style as well as the various adverts but these are a little daft for my taste. I do appreciate the capitalism dystopia of abandoning an astronaut but still screening him adverts but the actual adverts are a little too absurdist for my taste.
The game also offers New Game Minus which is a permadeath mode as well as a DLC - Hot Garbage. I didn’t bother with either of these as I’ve had my fill of the game and more pressingly, the day after this review is being written sees the release of Monster Hunter Wilds which I deemed a wee bit more important.
The similarities here between Journey and The Outer Worlds are quite apparent, in the same way I’m excited for the sequel releasing this year that can rectify a lot of the issues that I have. I still think it’s worth a go but I don’t think you’ll miss out on anything by waiting for Revenge.
