10 minutes into the game, the mystery of the planet's ecological decline is joined by another more jarring enigma: a derelict Soviet base, with wind-blown shacks, spindly telegraph poles and miles of concrete pipework threading into the distance. Chunky as your spacesuit is, you'll feel very small and fragile and endangered as you navigate these vast spaces, always responding to the slightest of cues regarding where to go next.Īnd the places Lifeless Planet leads you to can be pretty memorable. However it's done, it's deft stuff, so deft you'll rarely sense the designer's guiding hand at your elbow. There are obvious things like trails of footprints to follow, and there are subtle things, such as the angle at which the sun hits a distant landmark, or a gentle pinching-in of a canyon's walls as you move through it. From the initial crash site of your battered survival pod through to the truly giant last levels, you're being hustled along a set path by a designer who employs every trick in the book. Lifeless Planet is as much about manipulation as it is exploration. In truth, though, picking the right direction is never in doubt. I've never before loaded a game, pressed the start button, and immediately felt so exhilaratingly lost. You're running low on oxygen from the very beginning here (although the danger, as you move between scattered air canisters, is largely theatre), and the horizon seems to beckon you in every direction. If Lifeless Planet has a handful of central things that really mark it out, that elevate it beyond its occasional bursts of appealing home-made staginess, it's the genuine sense of oppressive isolation it creates and the huge chunks of alien real-estate it employs to do so. It's the search for answers that draws you through the game's daringly large maps. Firstly, why has this remote world - one that an astronaut has spent decades travelling to reach - turned out to be a grim dustbowl rather than the verdant paradise it initially appeared as when viewed from Earth? Secondly, what kind of person would volunteer for a one-way trip of such a devastating nature in the first place? The soundtrack's a twitchy, shimmering pleasure. Instead of plot twists and lore, you get straight-ahead pulp fiction powered by a bluntly-stated ecological theme and built around two interlocking questions. There is no combat, and its omission is glorious. In place of set-piece action sequences you get playful puzzles which are more concerned with altering the pace of the narrative than tying your brain in knots. Look around the huge 3D environments and you'll begin to understand how Board (and the Unity engine) did it, too, employing simple textures, basic geometry and a spacesuited hero whose bulky, iconic form negates the need for complex character models. This pared-back engineering spirit defines Lifeless Planet, a controlled yet surprisingly expansive science-fiction platforming exploration game that's been made, for the most part, by just one man - first-time designer David Board - and by the modern magic that is cheap development tools. Space travel's not about what you need to take with you so much as it's about what you've learned you can live without. Ideally, you want the cheapest, lightest booster for getting the most functional, efficient payload into orbit. Millions of moving parts go into these spaceships, but every nozzle, every pipe, every plastic button on every control panel has to justify itself in the master equations. As the ground shakes and the birds scatter, as the bus-sized interstage section detaches, flares and spins softly back to Earth, it can be tricky to remember that what you're watching is actually the triumphant launch of an object that's been carefully whittled down to its barest essentials. One of the things that can be hard to keep in mind about space travel - especially when there are rockets going off and thick clouds of exhaust obscuring the horizon - is that this stuff is mainly about economy.
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