izigame.me

This game either should have been about half the length, or it needed a lot more puzzle ideas.
The visual style is done quite well, especially the environmental art. The soundtrack is great, although it is a bit limited, and the main theme gets used way too often without enough variation. Kudos to the story being shown as opposed to told, and the emotional moments are sold well. However, while I'm all for letting a story breathe and a sense of pace, some story moments linger far too long. Several story sections each needed to be trimmed by a good 20-30 seconds as they went on long after the emotional impact and on to the point of annoyance.
Lana - the protagonist whom you control - moves relatively slowly. That isn't necessarily an issue in a cinematic puzzle platformer such as this, except the game doesn't have enough interesting content to fill its length. Lana's movement isn't fun in itself, so environmental storytelling moments that are drawn out for too long as you saunter past, or coming upon the same puzzle elements being reused far too often, or moments where you're running through environments with nothing particularly interesting happening are all amplified. The puzzles are, for the most part, quite simple to figure out, but some have surprisingly tight execution timing windows for this type of game with this type of movement, and having to redo any of those puzzles after failing can feel like a slog while Lana jogs slowly along.
The pace finally picks up a bit in the final act of the game, but even then it's not all that quick, and the rest of the game (~75% or so) needed to be edited down considerably to at least come close.
Planet of Lana does several things very well, but the overuse of the same puzzle elements repeatedly and too much time spent with nothing new or interesting happening in both gameplay and story make this a game I can't recommend. I'm someone who enjoys a great soundtrack and an interesting story with emotional impact enough that it can make up for only having decent gameplay, and this game left me annoyed and frustrated by the end. There are way too many other puzzle platformers that are far more worth your time.