![]() ![]() ![]() The simple rules of each biome - use Grapple seeds to scale the Cliffs of Mt. The irony is that the closer you come to fuelling your ship and starting the journey back home, the more bewitching your current climate becomes. Remember when indies looked generations behind triple-A releases? Or, you know, gave some indication that they weren’t made by a team of 1000 people with millions of dollars to spend? The detail on small items and variety of idle animations to its fauna is matched by its knack for pulling together a gorgeous vista with a painter’s eye for framing in just about any direction. ![]() Although let’s take a second to appreciate that yes, it does look very nice. There’s always a reason to pay attention to your surroundings here, one that goes beyond the game just looking nice. The bee-like critters who plague your progress at the base of the tower can all be killed in one fell swoop by shooting their hive, while the amber shields on some enemies can be corroded by the acidic fruit of Blight Bomb plants. Very little of the plants and creatures around you is there just to fill the space, and there’s a mild puzzle element to almost everything with a pulse. Worse, the only way I found to make it past a Meat Vortex (think organic waste disposal) was to lure those wide-eyed, innocent Pufferbirds into vortex-sucking range and continue along the path while they were being eviscerated. Maybe that doesn’t sound like a big deal to you, but I can’t tell you how wracked with guilt I felt upon that discovery. What’s more pertinent is that if you overfeed Pufferbirds in your quest for carbon, they simply pop. Grob is a purple-ish canned food paste that tastes, according to its promotional materials, anywhere between beef, lamb spleen poutine and cucumber shitwater, but that’s by the by. In a purely mechanical sense, they exist to produce carbon when you feed them Grob. Pufferbirds, the first sentient beings you encounter, are at least 50% eyeball and their trusting coos are impossible not to find endearing. It’s an interesting mix of aggressive wildlife, cutesy fauna and joyously weird scenery that entices you deeper once you’re outside the safety of your crashed ship, and JTTSP plays on this deviously. I’m certainly not complaining that co-op’s available, but rather recommending a more antisocial approach if you feel knee-deep in the progress treacle with a friend. If two of you are lost in different locations, a lot of your time’s spent first trying to figure out exactly where each of you is lost, /then/ finding the critical path. So much of your progress is about making sense of the area’s topography and figuring out how to manipulate the flora and fauna so you can delve deeper into it, and if you’re lost alone you only have the problem of finding your way again. In fact, this may actually work better as a solo game all-round. The game might even be hoist on its own petard here because when it’s played in co-op, it’s easy to let your Discord bantz drown out the jokes, or to race ahead without stopping to appreciate the details. (Image credit: Journey to the Savage Planet) ![]()
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