Ashitaka

Ashitaka 🦌🌳

👁️👁️

me immediately after oversharing way too much personal shit with somebody i’m only mild acquaintances with

Just finished Planet Alpha.

This game is all about setting and atmosphere, and it's absolutely gorgeous. The amount of imagination that went into the variety of beautiful and foreboding alien landscapes is just crazy. I started playing on my PC but found the graphics so detailed it was hard to follow them, so I got the Switch version instead, and found it much better on my TV screen.

The actual story in this one is quite vague, although there are definitely hints and clues about what might be going on. It's not uncommon for cinematic platformers to have ambiguous stories, but I found this one even more ambiguous than usual. After finishing it, I still feel like I could make about a hundred different theories about what's going on, but that doesn't really seem to be the point. Like I said, it's a game about setting and atmosphere.

And what it did excellently with that, besides just having incredible settings, is making you feel tiny and overwhelmed in them. Tiny, overwhelmed, and almost powerless, but not quite: just powerless enough that you suddenly feel epic when you manage to overcome an obstacle in an unexpected way. You have no fighting skills, and survive mainly by stealth and simple puzzling, but some of those puzzles involve turning environments and enemies against each other in ways that are just so satisfying. And the camera angles and zoom shift in each scene to accentuate the scope and grandness and sense of relative size.

Also, the sliding. I can't fully describe how much of a thrill some of the sliding scenes are in this game.

I didn't get quite as attached to the main character as I have some other games, but they're still pretty cute. I can't say I was highly drawn into the plot either, probably because it was so vague; but the game still kept my attention, although less like a drama and more like a semi-abstract art piece. That's not to say there was no emotional element though: the vibes in this game are powerful, the backstory is implied to be quite sad, and some of the escape sequences are excellently heart-pounding. Oh, and the ambient music is really good too.

Overall, while not my favorite cinematic platformer ever, I would definitely recommend Planet Alpha to anyone who wants an atmospheric experience that's just incredibly visually beautiful and surprising. Make sure to play on a big enough screen.

Posting these for no reason at all on a perfectly normal day of no cultural significance.