In between game of the year contender The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and personal favorite Star Trek Resurgence, a beautiful little puzzle platformer released earlier this year: Planet of Lana. From Wishfully Studios, Lana is a wonderful game, and certainly deserves consideration for best indie of the year.
The game starts peacefully. Lana and her friend Elo traverse their village on the water, sneaking around the kitchen and playing in a nearby forest. But soon tragedy strikes, and the beautiful blue and green vistas are ruined by alien invaders – machines descending down to capture Elo and the village’s inhabitants in a frightening, very World of the World-style way. Lana avoids capture and, along with an adorable cat-like companion, sets off to rescue Elo and the rest of the community.
Lana must avoid the machine invaders and her world’s native predators on her journey. As a puzzle platformer, Planet of Lana will task you with manipulating enemies and deftly navigating the environment to avoid failure. Mui, the black ball of cuteness, is often essential to puzzles. Mui can distract the Spider Droid-like enemies or manipulate water levels to allow Lana to avoid detection. She’ll also acquire news abilities herself as the game progresses, giving her new ways to interact with the environment and solve puzzles. They, together with Mui, add extra layers to the environmental puzzles, making each puzzle feel distinct and challenging enough.
I found the game’s difficulty curve to be extremely fair. As Lana gains more abilities, the puzzles grow more complex, but never without reason. I only got stuck a couple of times on puzzles and had to look up their solutions. However, each time my attempted solution was correct – only my execution lacked.
What really stands out to me about Planet of Lana are its stunning visuals and cinematic soundtrack. During a few reflective sequences on Lana’s adventure, the camera will pan back until Lana and Mui are just a few pixels on the bottom of your screen. They’ll scroll side to side, allowing you to take in the gorgeous colors and sweeping environments of Lana while the Takeshi Furukawa-composed soundtrack transports you to another world. Siobhan Wilson lends vocals to a couple tracks, which only hammer home the ‘cinematic’ quality of Planet of Lana.
Lana and Mui don’t just venture in the grassy plains surrounding Lana’s village. Their journey will take them underground, through a vibrant orange desert, and to some surprise destinations I won’t spoil. I greatly enjoyed the variety of locales Planet of Lana had on offer.
As mentioned above, Lana and Mui’s journey is all about rescuing the missing villagers. It’s effectively a textless story; the only spoken words are characters’ names. It’s simple enough – as a side scroller, you literally go from point A to point B to find the missing villagers – but its simplicity does not equate to a lack of emotional depth. Conversely, I grew rather attached to Lana and Mui as we ventured together. There’s some heavy hitting moments throughout the game, and, even though her lines are mostly just Elo and Mui’s names, Bianca Zoe Mantelli does a great job of portraying Lana’s pain, desperation, and perseverance.
I spent just over five hours with Planet of Lana, which, for me, feels like the perfect length for this sort of game. It never overstayed its welcome, though I imagine some players might wish it were longer (plenty of YouTube playthroughs clock in around three hours or so).
If you need a break from the life-consuming game of the year contenders this fall, Planet of Lana cannot be recommended enough. It offers up fun but not too challenging gameplay, an engaging story, and an absolute home run of a cinematic score that make it one of the best indie games of the year.
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