Planet of Lana Review (Riddler42)
The game is a mixture of an interactive novel/movie and a puzzle platformer. I finished the game in just over 5 hours and it was neat, but not really satisfying. For me it feels like by trying to mix three genres, all were done okay to good but none fulfilled their potential / promise.
Story: The story is cute, the visuals GORGEOUS and it has a few unexpected twists, but its rather straightforward / predictable most of the time. There is no dialogue so its mostly environmental story telling. In some cases this is done really well, and I could order things I'd seen at different times into the narrative, but it still felt lacking in detail and depth. It is also quite slow paced, even when there's no puzzles; many sections are just walking through wonderful graphics.
Platforming: The platforming has beautiful animations but pays for that in precision. That makes puzzles often tedious. Sometimes you can play as other entities than the player in the game, which I always found a lot more fun than playing & moving as Lana herself.
Puzzles: I did have several satisfying aha moments and I really liked how each section of the game added a few new mechanics that changed up the puzzles. My deal breaker is that, while It is mostly easy to figure out what to do, it's then difficult / tedious to actually do it. I found the vision cones of enemies a bit ambiguous, fall damage hard to estimate plus had the above troubles with the not-so-precise platforming.
Accessibility: In my opinion, it's straight out rude to provide a warning for photo-sensitive viewers at the start of the game but no accessibility setting to turn it off, nor a second warning before it happens. It was only one scene in the final cut scene so it wouldn't have been so much work and an ambiguous warning at the start is extremely unhelpful and seems more like a legal protection than actual care or consideration for photo-sensitive gamers.
In summary, this game relies heavily on its amazing graphics and beautiful music, but the game play was not very satisfying to me, and the story not as gripping as I'd hoped. It's still a pretty good way to spend a couple of hours on the weekend.