Planet of Lana Review (Switch eShop)

The cinematic platformer: although some great examples have emerged over the decades, the genre perhaps under-celebrated, with its fans especially under-served for a long stretch in the 2000s. It has nonetheless provided some truly legendary games: Prince of Persia, Another World, Flashback, and Inside. Planet of Lana gathers together the most appealing elements of all of these – along with other notable examples of the genre – and rolls them up into something modern and engaging, if not entirely original.

Planet of Lana, the debut title from indie developer Wishfully Studios, is a visually striking puzzle-driven platformer. It has shades of Studio Ghibli in its muted palette and nature-versus-technology themes; it also maintains a low-stress atmosphere through its gentle difficulty, sweeping scenery and rich musical score. The story starts with Lana playing games with a friend. A sudden robot invasion leads to her friend’s capture and kicks off a quest to rescue her. Along the way, Lana is joined by an alien sidekick, with whom she cooperates to overcome obstacles and stealthily evade baddies.

While looking and feeling modern and accessible, Planet of Lana makes some neat callbacks to classic cinematic platformers. One feature of those early games, for example, was a kind of modularity. Prince of Persia and the like achieved cutting-edge animations by moving their characters in little chunks. Each unit of the slick, rotoscoped animations always played out, with the player’s next move – changing course or timing a jump – only following after a step of the animation. A side effect of this was a sort of “jump assist”, where the lag in the controls gave generous windows in which to manoeuvre. Although Planet of Lana is much more modern, such as marrying its flowing visuals with greater responsiveness, it happily replicates that forgiving nature by allowing a very generous “coyote time” – a wide-open opportunity to hit jump even just after running off a platform.

A side effect of the flowing but fixed animations in older cinematic platformers was an equally modular level design: Lester in Another World, Conrad in Flashback, and the Prince of Persia all moved in predefined chunks, so the levels were composed of units of a corresponding size. Flashback’s gun combat also operated in discrete units of action, so scenes played out like a series of pre-calculated puzzles. Planet of Lana absolutely harks back to this, the world being built of a series of set pieces, constructed around a classic moveset of runs and jumps, ledge-grabbing, and rolling. The overall result is a highly playable combination of modern fluidity and retro specificity, with a focus on light, sequential puzzling over exploration.

Traversal is graceful and enjoyable, too, more like Playdead’s Inside than the abstracted controls of the classics, constrained by those animations. When you’re running, jumping, climbing, or swinging on ropes, it all feels solid and fun. If there’s one criticism, it’s that there is a bit too much time spent just running right, without significant obstacles or any need for other inputs. It made us think of Beethoven & Dinosaur’s The Artful Escape, which used a simple – even silly – but quite ingenious idea of adding a single button press to play a guitar while the hero runs. Short of a guitar, Planet of Lana might have benefitted from a more playful jump or roll to toy with while running.

“Just running right” is a symptom of the cinematic platformer's modern drive for spectacle. As the background and foreground explode with colours, flashes and world-enriching depth and scale, running right is a way to have it play out in a way that the player can sit back and appreciate. Planet of Lana opts with confidence for that low-difficulty design approach, freeing you to drink in the impressive scenery and soundtrack. It does mean all the events lack an element of peril – unlike, say, Adrian Lazar’s Planet Alpha, which used skill- and patience-testing challenges to give the visual set pieces a bit of oomph. Planet of Lana’s easy running is tons of fun if you’re happy to play quite passively at times.

And the spectacular presentation helps build the story – to an extent. The narrative is vague, to say the least, so while the lovely vistas add flavour, it’s not always clear what they’re adding flavour to. The less-is-more approach just about works, and we enjoyed the reminder of Another World with its alien helper. Calling the alien in an unknown language and working to help each other, the relationship is rather like guiding Yorda in Ico, with some similar, if spatially more simplistic, puzzles. There is, in fact, another loose Ico connection: composer Takeshi Furukawa provides the score, as he did for Fumito Ueda’s Ico descendent The Last Guardian. The music sits quietly in the background for the steady play of the game, spinning up the tension effectively for the action and stealth interludes, moving from light piano to powerful orchestra, even breaking at one point for a vocal set piece.

Lana’s critter companion does a bit more than follow along and obey orders, too. Through it, Lana can control enemies for certain puzzles, reminiscent of 2023’s Another World-callback Full Void, from OutOfTheBit. These are some of the more interesting and challenging puzzles among a fairly light collection. When ordering your companion, manipulating the environment, steering enemies and platforming all combine, the world feels richly interactive. However, those moments are scarcer than the bits where you just run right.