I’ve got a long list of games that I feel didn’t get their due when they came out, so any time there’s an opportunity to bring them up, I take it. For example, whenever a new Star Wars game comes out, I make a point to mention the criminally underrated Squadrons. I do the same thing with Midnight Suns every time there’s a new MCU movie,but that’s becoming a rare occurrence.
It doesn’t take much to get me to wax poetic about Slay the Princess, Hardspace: Shipbreaker, The Forgotten City, or the We Were Here games, but one game at the top of my list I hardly ever get to bring up isJourney to the Savage Planet, a real gem deserves a lot more attention than it’s ever managed to attract.
Now that it’s joined the Game Pass line-up - and with so much Metroid Prime 4 hype out there - now is the perfect time to check out Journey to the Savage Planet if you’ve never played it before. If you clicked in to find out the name of the game, here’s the elevator pitch: what if Metroid Prime was a ‘00s-era Adult Swim show that you could beat in a day? Also,it has a grappling hook. Need I say more?
Well, I will. Metroid Prime-like isn’t just my cute way of circumventing the exhausted Metroidvania label. Journey to the Savage Planet is among a small group of games heavily inspired by the level design and item-based progression of Metroid Prime specifically. Games like Batman: Arkham Asylum, Control, and the new Tomb Raider trilogy share a lot of DNA with Metroid Prime (Tomb Raider devs cite Metroid as a direct inspiration), but Journey to the Savage Planet is the closest thing there is to a true Prime-like.
If you’ve played Metroid Prime, you’ll immediately recognize how similar the setting, level design, and gameplay loops are. Your mission is to explore a labyrinthine alien planet made of interconnected biomes. Roadblocks will force you to seek out new upgrades like jet packs, acid bombs, and grappling hooks that will allow you to progress forward, which often means backtracking to a previously blocked path. Between its hostile alien wildlife, its environmental puzzles, and its heavy use of first-person platforming (so many bounce pads), playing Journey to the Savage Planet feels like exploring Zebes for the first time.
Where it differs from Prime is in its tone. While Metroid is a claustrophobic horror, Savage Planet is a comedy that uses the aesthetic of golden-age sci-fi to tell a tongue-in-cheek, lightly anti-capitalist story. You are an employee of Kindred Aerospace, the self-proclaimed “4th Best Interstellar Exploration Company”, on a mission to find a habitable second home for humanity to replace a dying Earth. After crash landing on ARY-26, you set out to find the means to repair your ship, accompanied only by a morose AI and frequent video messages from Kindred’s boorish CEO Martin Tweed.
For the most part, the humor works well. It balances its gags and one-liners with the gameplay much better than, say, High on Life, and its Tim & Eric-style surrealism has aged a lot better than Justin Roiland’s rambling nihilism. One of its running jokes is a series of live-action commercials for bizarre and non-descript future-Earth products, likeGROB!, a metallic purple food paste that looks like the thing that crawled off of John Cusack’s plate in Better of Dead, orMeat Buddy, a demonic meat man I wish I could wipe from my memory forever.
The commercials are optional. You don’t have to look at Meat Buddy if you don’t want to, which is understandable.
But all in all, what I love most about Savage Planet is the way the ecology of the planet works with its level design and art direction to create a world worth exploring. Like Zebes, ARY-26 feels like a living, breathing place with a history to learn and secrets to uncover. A convention of the genre is the way it insists you explore every corner of the world and leave no stone unturned, and Savage Planet makes the effort to ensure all its corners are worth checking and its stones are worth turning. It’s a vibrant, gorgeous game that’s worth the seven to eight hours it takes to complete.
