It’s even better when you can work with a friend, and it does feel like many of the challenges in Journey to the Savage Planet – particularly those involving combat – have been designed for co-op play. Here, the artificiality helps in making it clear what you can do, and once you start zipping around and double jumping high up in the air the sense of mobility is wonderful. Traversing around the environment is a real joy, too. Perhaps it’s because areas flow beautifully from one to the next, and there’s the sense that every time you head off in a new direction you’re going to discover something really neat. I’m not much of a “Metroidvania” fan, where areas are locked off until you can find the right skills and backtrack your way back, but Journey to the Savage Planet has a real X-factor that makes the experience pristine.
The thing is, though, once you can start playing on those platforms high in the sky, the exploration is genuinely wonderful. At first, you can barely climb a waist-high wall. You won’t be able to access them, much less get across them at first, because first you’ve got to explore around the environment to find the right resources and skills that will let you use grappling hooks, double jumps, and all those other movement boots. You’ll look up in the sky and see floating platforms just sitting there, which the game gets away with – just – thanks to its surrealistic science fiction vibe, but you’ll know that mechanically those are platforms that are there purely because the level designers wanted to give you some platforming moments. Journey to the Savage Planet is often artificial. Rather, it was the movement around the space. It wasn’t enough to let Journey to the Savage Planet down, but I do feel bad for the team that I may have lost a little of the edge that they were gunning for.Īfter finishing the game, thinking back to what really stuck with me, it was not the narrative, though. One is John Wayne, the other is Charles Darwin, and yet, on the initial impressions it really was difficult to shake the feeling that I was being asked to laugh at many of the same jokes, and explore vibrant visual spaces that had now become familiar. Journey to the Savage Planet is a (somewhat) less violent, more pleasant experience of discovery and journey. Obsidian’s thing is an RPG which closely parallels the wild west cinematic genre. Thankfully the games are different in application. It can’t have been easy for the developers of Journey to the Savage Planet to look back at their game and realise that they’d just thrown themselves into a direct comparison to Obsidian. Both feature a bitingly satirical view on capitalism run wild. The two play very differently, but in every other way they’re eerily similar: both feature bright, cartoonish visions of science fiction, and are gorgeous in their embrace of the surreal.
No developer would ever admit to being annoyed that another developer got a game out first, but Journey to the Savage Planet’s developer must surely have seen the release of The Outer Worlds last year and groaned just a little.
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