The Abandoned Planet review

Several hours of puzzling fun in a beautiful alien world may leave you feeling unfulfilled if looking for something more substantial

There’s nothing like a good meal, the saying goes, and it’s true—but only if you’re hungry. It’s well and good to return to the kitchen for seconds and thirds, but what if you had a late lunch? What if all you’ve got room for is a cheese plate and a half-sleeve of crackers? Sometimes lighter fare is all you need, whether in gaming or gastronomy. The Abandoned Planet is an airy snack of a game, providing an interesting setting, a character to explore it, and a series of not-too-challenging puzzles—and not much more than that. If you’re looking for something light between meals, it’s liable to hit the spot; if you’re hungry for more, though, you might want to search elsewhere for bigger portions.

The Abandoned Planet starts with a bang, as your character—an unnamed astronaut—accidentally pilots her ship through a wormhole, which spits her out at high velocity to crash smack-dab onto an uncharted world. Though she survives unscathed, the vessel is wrecked, and she’s got no way to call for rescue. Lacking options, she sets out to explore her surroundings in the slim hope of finding another way off-planet. She quickly discovers signs of a long-vanished civilization, but what happened to its people is a mystery: the crumbling remains of builders and buildings alike tell her only that a cataclysm destroyed what had once been a thriving society. Still, as she hopes for a miracle, one question lingers: is she truly alone?

You control the astronaut in first person, moving through node-based environments with either WASD or a clickable on-screen arrow display. Your cursor changes when you hover over a hotspot, becoming a hand when you can pick up or use something and a magnifying glass to examine; hover at the top of the screen to access your inventory from a drop-down menu. Certain arcade-adjacent sequences shift your perspective to third-person and grant you direct WASD control, as when you raft down a river or crawl through a system of ducts, with the cursor still available when you need to click.

While the shipwrecked astronaut is the game’s protagonist, the titular planet is its true star. Developer Dexter Team understands that any game centered on exploring a strange and exotic environment must live and die on the strength of its setting, and have directed their energies accordingly. The planet is abandoned, but it’s far from lifeless: the pixel art backgrounds are rich with detail, with a lush and varied color palette that imbues each screen with lively energy, and subtle environmental animations keep the many depopulated vistas from feeling static. You’ll journey through a multitude of distinctively realized settings: a rocky river canyon, a rain-drenched jungle island, and a subterranean scientific complex, among others. Each has its own visual identity that sets it apart from neighboring regions.

The game doesn’t let its almost total lack of living characters stand in the way of telling its story, communicating the broad strokes of the planet’s history largely through graphical and environmental cues. From the deserted city’s crumbling architecture, to the living spaces and pieces of ancient art you stumble upon, down to the placement and orientation of old bones, everything appears calculated to help you understand on an intuitive level who lived here and what might have happened to them. You might never discover the full truth, but you may be surprised to realize how much you can figure out.

Oddly, it’s only in depicting The Abandoned Planet’s alien wildlife that its imagination fails. With few exceptions, the various beasts you come across are depicted as nearly featureless silhouettes, with only their teeth or eyes given definition. It’s a mystifying decision that the game never attempts to justify: the astronaut never comments on this odd characteristic apparently common to all the planet’s fauna, so it’s never clear whether they look like that to her or if it’s a (baffling) stylistic choice. Either way, it sticks out, and not in a good way. In a game so full of color and rich visual design, it leaves the alien creatures feeling like an unsatisfying afterthought.

While the first-person perspective means you don’t see much of your astronaut except in brief third-person cutscenes, she’s no passive Zorkian AFGNCAAP. From the very start, as she fights to control her ship’s descent, you’ll get a keen sense of her tenacious, can-do approach to survival. This is due in large part to Erika Merchant’s lively voice performance, which imbues her with pluck and determination, and an energetic electronic soundtrack that lends emotional heft to her journey’s highs and lows. Her face appears in the lower left corner of your HUD, complete with speaking animations. She may be alone, but she comments constantly on what’s happening, expressing surprise and wonder at the new sights she encounters or debating aloud what she ought to do next.

The Abandoned Planet

Genre:	Science Fiction
Presentation:	2D or 2.5D, Slideshow
Theme:	Escape, Outer space, Lost Civilization
Perspective:	First-Person
Graphic Style:	Pixel art
Gameplay:	Puzzle, Exploration
Control:	Point-and-click
Game Length:	Short (1-5 hours)
Difficulty:	Low

Unfortunately, the latter has the tendency to take some of the wind from the game’s sails, as your character is so quick to offer her thoughts on next steps that she often preempts any need to consider them yourself. There’s hardly ever a moment when you won’t have a solid idea of what to do, but that’s not always down to solid puzzle design—a lot of the time, it’s that the astronaut pretty much tells you. With no one else to talk to, it’s natural that most of her characterization would have to come via her tendency to monologue, but The Abandoned Planet goes far beyond that. The protagonist comes to seem less like a lonely explorer speaking aloud to keep herself company than a Dora-esque children’s host coaxing an unseen audience to complete her sentences.

The puzzles never justify this level of hand-holding, either. The majority are competently constructed, if not overly memorable, with many based on inventory collection or on slider-lock manipulation. Few if any of these are well-served by having the astronaut speculate leadingly on how she might solve them; if you’ve played this kind of game before, you’ll have at least a general idea without her input. At the start, for instance, it’s sometimes helpful for her to remind you of the environmental scanning device she carries in her inventory, which lets you analyze the chemical makeup of an object or bit of scenery. It’s an important component in a number of puzzles, but the mechanic is so firmly established by the middle of the game that the reminders become superfluous.

The best and most intricate puzzles rely on your ability to decipher and interpret the pictograms in an alien notebook, and to recognize the corresponding devices or inputs when you find them in the wild. To solve these you’ll have to figure out the basics of an alien system of numbering and make logical conclusions based on limited evidence. On these you won’t get any reminders to look in your book when the time comes; here, at least, you’re afforded enough trust to think of it yourself. These puzzles strike a nice balance between obtuseness and solvability, so that you’ll know what you need to do but have to work to figure out the specifics.

The farther you progress, and the more puzzles you solve, the more you’ll grasp of what’s happened on the planet and how it came to be abandoned. As mentioned, the environmental storytelling is strong, but there’s some narrative disconnect between present and past that makes it hard to become totally invested in either. While the astronaut expresses curiosity about the planet’s history, she never connects with it in a way that makes that story seem like part of hers. She’s here now, yes, and she’s curious about what she’s found, but nothing ever changes the fact that she’d be happy to drop everything and leave at the first opportunity.

At the same time, we learn precious little about what “home” means to her, or what she’s trying to get back to, so her desire to escape feels basically academic. The planet, while lonely, is clearly habitable, and she demonstrates that she could survive there a good long time. Why, then, should she or the player hurry to depart? The game never provides much of an answer to that question, leaving the stakes feeling muddled and the narrative without a source of real tension. Even the frequent tantalizing hints that she might not be as alone as she thinks eventually prove of little consequence to her.

These narrative issues are further complicated by an abrupt and rather befuddling ending that both teases a continuation of some kind and apparently sets the game within the world of Dexter Stardust, the developer’s previous title. Not having played that game, I wasn’t sure what the ending was telling me; having looked it up since, I still don’t really know. The implications for the character we’ve followed are clear, but beyond that I felt like the game had waited until its final minute to let me know I wasn’t part of its target audience. Up to that point, The Abandoned Planet had seemed an entirely stand-alone title; a Dexter Stardust fan might enjoy the climactic revelation that it isn’t, but I struggle to grasp what the rest of us are meant to take from it.

Final Verdict

As first-person point-and-click adventures go, The Abandoned Planet can’t stand side by side with the more substantial titles of its kind, either in terms of storytelling or the chance to really puzzle over the challenges you’ve been set. What it does do, mostly successfully, is deliver a light and pleasant opportunity to spend five or so hours solving puzzles in enjoyable sci-fi surroundings. You’ll get to think a bit without over-straining your brain; you’ll see some very pretty scenery accompanied by a lovely soundtrack; and you’ll experience a more-or-less complete story in the process (give or take its teasing final moments). If that sounds like your speed, it’s certainly a journey worth taking.

Will played The Abandoned Planet on PC using a review code provided by the game's publisher. 

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