Planet of Lana (2023) [PC] critique

It’s dangerous to go alone. Take this.

-Old Man in a Cave

We’ve heard it since we first started adventure gaming: It’s dangerous to go alone. Every game translates this in different ways. Some, in classic fashion, give you a sword and send you on your way as if a sword is a stalwart companion. Some build teams of permanent characters, some disposable, and march off into the unknown. And sometimes, it’s just you and a single ally on a small adventure with big stakes. Planet of Lana could hardly have provided a smaller friend with a bigger heart. 

Meet Lana, a young girl whose village and family has been kidnapped by invading robots. At first, it seems like she’s going to have to go it alone, but before long, you meet a strange little cat creature in danger. With a little cleverness and determination, Lana rescues and befriends the cat, named Mui. Going forward, the two must work together to progress in the chase after Lana’s friends. Unlike other games of a similar ilk, you don’t swap controls between the two characters. Instead, you are always Lana, but you can give directions to Mui to guide them and yourself around patrolling enemies.

With vibes similar to indies that I loved such as Limbo and Never Alone, Planet of Lana provided a gameplay experience that I found surpassed both. 

The 8-Bit Review

Visuals: 10/10

My god, this game is simply gorgeous. Filled with color and beauty and nature, even in the darker corners of the world, making the mechanical enemies stand out as something that doesn’t belong here. There were many times I just wanted to stop and look around, take in the scenery. At important points, the screen pulls out the view to a distance, giving you a scale for an epic sunrise or giant machinery. 

It’s also difficult to get lost or stuck, as everything interactable is clearly marked. Points you can grab onto or ask Mui to jump to are bright yellow, machines you can use glow with power. I never encountered a point where I had no idea where to go or what I could interact with. It’s spectacular breadcrumbing without being overbearing.

Audio: 10/10

The music in Planet of Lana was composed by Takeshi Furukawa, composer for The Last Guardian, and recorded by the Hungarian Studio Orchestra. What this adds up to is music that would not be out of place in an epic fantasy film. It’s a level of quality rarely seen in indie video games. The music matches the moods the game wants to convey perfectly. Quiet and nervous when you need to be stealthy. Epic swells when racing through the desert for your life. Cheerful childishness in peaceful moments. 

Music is also an important element within the game itself, as the robots and mechanical structures communicate with musical chimes. You’ll hear the same few five-note tones repeatedly, but it’s so pleasant, you don’t mind it. It’s not overused despite the prominence. 

Even the minimal sound effects in the game are top tier. Falling onto soft ground sounds different from crashing to your knees on metal, which results in a satisfying clang. The gentle scrape of wood on wood as you move boxes around to reach higher places. The quiet moments in the forest echo with bird chatter and distant animal noises. The world feels full and alive, even if you don’t always see the things filling it. 

Gameplay: 8/10

Planet of Lana is one of those games with a simple gameplay premise: keep going right. Sometimes you have to go left to go right but generally, you’re going to go right. Along the way, you’ll encounter enemies both living and robotic that you have to outsmart using your brains and Mui’s skills and obedience. You’re just a little girl and a cat on a planet with no visible technological advancements, after all. You can’t fight bullets and electric shocks with a stick, so do your best to avoid them. 

Step 1: free cat. Step 2: follow cat.

There are also plenty of puzzles without enemies around for you to take your time solving. You don’t have any concerns about getting lost or sidetracked, only stuck. The difficulty levels of the puzzles and stealth sections are such that it may take a few tries to figure out what to do, but the game’s reloads are generous and quick, often saving mid-puzzle so you don’t even have to start from the top every time. 

The game also has several different methods to make sure you bring your partner with you as you progress, since Mui will stay where you tell them to stay until you direct otherwise. Suffice to say, you won’t end up stuck anywhere because you accidentally left Mui behind three puzzles ago. 

Narrative: 9/10

It’s a normal day in Lana’s sleepy little fishing village, and her big sister Ila wants to play. A quick adventure to the outskirts turns disastrous, though, when the sky lights up with massive machines falling from the atmosphere. Ila shoves Lana into tall grass to avoid behind grabbed by a giant flying robot with a cage. Lana races back to town in time to see everyone else being carried away by similar robots. She chases them until she can’t run anymore and wakes up the next morning completely alone. Where did the robots come from? Why are they here? What have they done with Lana’s friends and family? And has this sort of thing happened before? Lana has many questions, and only one way to get the answers.

It takes a strong storyteller to deliver a world and story without words, but developer Wishfully managed it masterfully. That’s not to say the characters of Lana don’t speak. They use an alien language (which, keeping with the fabulous audio, is soft and gentle) to communicate. Clever listeners can figure out some of the language based on repetition and Mui’s actions. Still, you don’t need words to follow the duo’s adventure and understand the weight and importance of events and discoveries.

Accessibility: 8/10

The developers of Lana put a lot of care into making sure the game was easy to pick up, easy to follow, and easy to play regardless of age or gaming experience. As I went over in the gameplay section, the basics of the game are simple: keep going right, solving puzzles along the way. Without using words, unobtrusive tool tips teach you to play and keep you moving throughout the game, such as showing you to crouch when at a low-roofed area or which button to use when objects are interactable. Some show up every time, while others only reappear during high pressure situations such as the stealth portions. Even if you’re the type to panic under stress, you’ll have a visual idea of what you need to do. You’ll rarely be juggling multiple buttons at a time as well. 

Tutorials help you along the way. Lana and Mui can both interact with yellow-lined objects.

Built-in accessibility options include being able to turn off quick-time events (mostly limited to the last quarter of the game) and scaling the UI, already minimal as it is, up or down. Since the chosen color of interactables is yellow, it’s less likely to cause trouble for the more common colorblindness, and there are no color-based puzzles at all. The only major potential accessibility problem I can see is the inability to change the control setup.

Challenge: 6/10

Thanks to the breadcrumbs I mentioned in Visuals, Planet of Lana doesn’t end up being challenging to navigate through. As a puzzle platformer, you want the game to find a flow, starting with easy challenges and gradually pushing your critical thinking skills further and further. In perhaps it’s one weak point, Lana doesn’t have a whole lot of variety in its puzzles through to the end. Many of them rely on the same tactics that you use at the start: pushing things to jump higher, hiding in tall grass and using Mui to lure an enemy while you sneak away. Enemy variety doesn’t change either from the beginning, just the patrol paths, so once you’ve seen the starting handful, you’ve seen the majority of the challenge offered. 

Replayability: 6/10

Planet of Lana doesn’t have multiple endings, so going back to find things you missed isn’t a major drive. There are some secrets you can miss in the form of hidden shrines, but collecting them does little more than reveal a bit of lore that, interesting though it may be, you can mostly piece together through the story anyway. Kindly, though, the game provides a chapter select so you can easier hunt them down. There’s also encouragement to replay it in the form of a “deathless” achievement, for the more hardcore achievement hunters. If you’re not a “see everything, do everything, find everything” gamer, though, you may not find a reason to go back for a second run.

Personal: 9/10

The most important controls: pet your cat.

Despite the lack of variety in the puzzles and challenges, I loved this game. In only four hours, you grow attached to the characters. You wish you could stick around and see how things change after the ending. There was only one place where a new mechanic wasn’t clearly explained and I had to look up a solution. In hindsight, I probably should have tried it first before assuming I couldn’t do it. As someone who usually struggles with puzzles despite a deep love of them, I was fully satisfied with what Planet of Lana had to offer.

We would like to thank Wishfully and Thunderful Games for providing us with a copy of this game.

Aggregate score: 8.2

Maggie Maxwell spends most of her days buried in her fiction writing, only coming up for air to dive into the escapism of video games, cartoons, or movies. She can usually be found on Twitter as @wanderingquille and @MaxNChachi or streaming on Twitch with her husband, also as MaxNChachi.