Planet of Lana II - Review

This game is a sequel to the original Planet of Lana that came out in 2023 and that I did not know of until now. If you are like me, don’t worry, you could still play the sequel as is, since it features an introduction that tells the events of the first game in a few minutes. I’m not going to spoil things for you in case you want to do the first one before this sequel.

The first game is apparently a fairly short game that can be completed in 7 to 8 hours. This second one lasts about the same, too. The scene takes place on another planet, where two factions are at war and you are caught in the middle.

A feeling of Déjà vu?

Planet of Lana II is a sci-fi 2D side action game, that will remind you immediately of games such as Limbo or Insidesince it follows very much the same recipe. You control a young girl and Mui, an alien pet, at the same time, and the typical action is to go from one screen to the next, while solving puzzles. Puzzles a la Limbo, we are not talking about brain games to solve here. It’s mostly about:

• Understanding what each of your characters can do
• Identifying the final trigger that will let you pass the current obstacle
• Doing things in the right order (and often, fast enough) to make it work

I tend to attribute this type of gameplay to Limbo because it’s definitely the most recent title that set the recipe for new games to be made on the same pattern, but the real first game that introduced this model is Another World on the Amiga back in 1991. Not only was Another World hugely influential in terms of gameplay, it also created a new graphical style based on polygons, and the key characteristic of a face-less protagonist. What was a technical limitation (drawing eyes and face features on very low-resolution screens did not look good back in 1991), has become a trait for its descendants. A kind of a brand, while the technical and artistic considerations are not the same anymore.

The puzzles are not too hard. Sometimes it’s as simple as putting boxes in the right order. Some other times you need to take control of smaller animals, and use them (how horrible!) in order to get rid of larger predators in the area. In other words, better them than you! At some point you also encounter robots and surveillance cameras, and in such scenes it’s about deactivating them at the right time in order to secure a safe passage. I hope you get the idea.

You get to move Lana as a regular character on your gamepad. For Mui, your alien pet, you typically indicate with the right shoulder button where you’d like him to go. You can be demanding, this alien animal can jump pretty far and climb on walls as well. If for some reason you are TOO demanding, you will see him refusing to move, or making a sound to let you know you are off your rock. I guess this is really the key innovation of Planet of Lana: making you juggle with 2 characters at the same time.

Just like in Another World, there is no game over when you die. You can restart as often as you’d like until you beat the present puzzle. And trust me, you will die a lot! Some puzzles have traps that will kill you if you move too fast. But with enough trial and error, you will get there and no puzzle should stay in your way.

The key characteristic of Planet of Lana is that it puts you in charge of controlling 2 characters at the same time. The young girl Lana and Mui. Mui can jump very high, and also create some kind of spherical magnetic disruption that can disable devices and robots for a short time. There are more capabilities added later on as well. The first chapter is all about letting you becoming familiar with the controls and what the characters can do, while unveiling some background about the current world.

Since this takes place on a different world (yet another Another World trope!) all conversations happen in a foreign (as in invented) language, without subtitles. Once again, just like in Another World, even if the language can’t be understood, you get pointers and hints based on gestures, intonation, and visual elements. It works very well and shows once again that a great story can be told without actual words.

Very solid work

You can see there’s a lot of work that went into making Planet of Lana 2. The environments are beautiful and not static (wind flowing through the trees), characters and enemies are well animated too. You get to travel in a lot of beautiful environments, a beach village, a mountain, an icy mountain, underwater worlds, secret enemy bases, etc… There are definitely a few pointers that were taken right from the book of Inside (the submarine part feels VERY similar, for some reason).

And just like in such games the landscapes are HUGE and will make you feel like a termite crawling on the floor, looking up in awe. Some of the creatures or contraptions can be fairly original, like this autonomous mining robot.

The soundtrack is great too. Definitely has great cinematic vibes and does a great job to bring you along the few action scenes here and there, or to set a relaxing atmosphere in calmer areas.

The game is not very long - about 8 hours give or take, so there’s that. But the good thing is that it keeps putting you in new places fairly often - so there’s no time to be bored. If anything, the story in itself is not very original - Limbo and Inside are fantastic games on their own, because they manage to make you think behind the gameplay. Planet of Lana 2 feels like a good, enjoyable movie. There’s no huge surprises, it’s well done and packaged, and feels like a good lot of fun.

But will I remember it 10 years from now? Probably not.

And it’s OK, you can’t have genre-defining games the whole time. If anything, the puzzles tend to be a little repetitive (the same mechanics used over and over again), something that Inside was pretty careful not to do.

One more thing that needs improvement is the constant trait of the game to fade to black a little too often, usually before and after cutscenes. That feels unnecessary, you could do just like in many other games a smooth transition to the cutscene since the whole thing uses the same engine anyway. Sometimes, after a cutscene you are placed standing, immobile, following a frantic cutscene - the transitions do not always make sense. It’s nothing major, but this lacks a little of polish here and there to feel more immersive.

Steam Deck

The game is Verified on the Steam Deck. I did not play the whole game on it, this time I played on my desktop for most of this review. But I did try it quickly on the Deck, enough to confirm the performance and its suitability. It actually runs super well on the Deck, with pretty much stable 60 FPS at “high” details (the default), and this at 5W TDP setting for the GPU! For the quality of graphics you get, this is an amazing level of performance that puts a lot of other games to shame. It’s actually made with Unity, which shows that the devs have been able to do proper optimizations to get the best out of it. For reference, on my regular workstation gear equipped with a (very silent) RTX 3090, I could get stable 60 FPS on ultra-wide resolution screen (3440x1440 pixels) in ultra settings.

The only little problem is the weight of the game: 40 GB feels excessive. The environments are great, but the first game did fit in less than 10 GBs, and there’s not like 4 times more content in this one either, since it lasts about the same as the first one. Pretty sure this could have easily fit in twice less footprint and still look great nonetheless.

Next Steps

I liked it! I liked it enough that I ended up purchasing the first opus as well since it is currently on sale! This is a good sale, by the way, letting you get the two games for the price of “1.3”. You can find the game on its own Steam Page. I think it’s priced just right - anything more expensive would feel too much less for than 10 hours, and right now with the bundle you can get about 15 hours in total for about 20 dollars.

Note: we were provided a review key from the publishers for Planet of Lana 2 (not the first one).