Planet of Lana Review

Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard is the top story again this week. With the deal slowly getting closer and closer to the finish line.

Studio buyouts, mergers, and aggressive business practices are nothing new, of course, but this one feels different. Buying a developer is one thing, but a $69 billion buyout of an entire publisher whose games are already on your platform anyway doesn’t sound like it’ll “bring the joy and community of gaming to everyone” to me. And probably not to the people Microsoft has laid off recently, either.

Anyway, there are plenty of intelligent (and not-so-intelligent) takes on that subject elsewhere. Not to mention the large-scale mobilisation of insufferable console warriors currently locking horns across social media that it’s provoked.

If you’re anything like me, you’re sick to death of hearing about it. So to change things up a bit, I thought I’d talk about a rather lovely little game I played this week instead.

That’s right, this week I actually found time to play and finish something; Wishfully’s Planet of Lana, a game I’d been looking forward to (and featured a couple of times in this very newsletter) ever since it was first revealed.

The success of games such as Limbo and Inside means indie puzzle-platformers with a dark edge have almost become a genre in their own right. And although Planet of Lana has a far friendlier art style and is never quite as grisly as those games, mechanically it follows all the same rules laid down by Playdead’s mini-masterpieces.