Planet of Lana

I keep coming back to one image: Lana and her small, cat-like companion Mui silhouetted against a bruised sky, the camera pulling wide to reveal the scale of what they are up against, and then the orchestra swelling just enough to remind you this is someone's life's work. Planet of Lana is a side-scrolling cinematic puzzle-platformer built in the tradition of Limbo and Inside, but it carries its own warmth, its own color, and a score by Takeshi Furukawa that sits in a completely different emotional register from those stone-cold predecessors. The core loop pairs Lana and Mui as a duo you control in tandem. Stealth is the grammar of most encounters: hiding in tall grass, ducking into crawlspaces, slipping past sentinel robots before they complete their sweep. Puzzles start gentle, asking you to weigh down pressure pads or build simple scaffolding, then layer in creature manipulation, water-level mechanics, magnetic platforms, and eventually drone hijacking to route past obstacles. The companion system is where the design finds its personality. Mui can be sent ahead to flip switches, lure away creatures, climb heights Lana cannot reach, and later harness a hypnotic ability tied to the world's natural logic. Pointing Mui to exact spots can be finicky, and more than once the lock-on misfires under pressure, but the checkpoint system is generous enough that it rarely stings for long. What the puzzles lack in brain-melting complexity they make up for in environmental variety: the route takes you through jungles, arid sandstorms, darkened cave networks, and the cold geometry of enemy machinery before a final chapter that earns the orchestral crescendo waiting for it. The honest caveat is that Planet of Lana is primarily a mood delivery system with puzzles attached. If you arrive wanting the mechanical density of a Baba Is You or the spatial cruelty of Portal, you will be underfed. Movement feels deliberately unhurried, climbing and running both erring on the slow side, and the puzzle design rarely strays far from its established kit once the core mechanics are in place. Some players will clock out before the four-to-six-hour runtime completes; others will feel the pacing as exactly right for what the game is trying to say. The split tends to track the same divide as responses to Inside: atmosphere-first players versus systems-first players. What developer Wishfully got exactly right is knowing when to zoom out. The camera periodically pulls back to reveal horizon-spanning vistas that function as both visual reward and spatial orientation for the next puzzle set piece. The hand-painted environments shift from lush and idyllic to industrial and hostile in a progression that mirrors the story's emotional arc without a single line of recognizable dialogue. Furukawa's score does the talking instead, cinematic and layered in a way that rewards headphones. The animation is similarly precise: the weight of climbing a vine, the small panic in Lana's movement when something goes wrong, the way Mui's curiosity reads in every idle frame. This is craftsmanship used with purpose, not dressed up as such. Planet of Lana is the kind of game the indie space exists to protect. It is short, intentional, and made with care that shows in every background layer. Go in as a viewer who also gets to solve things, not as a puzzle hunter who tolerates cutscenes, and it delivers something genuinely affecting. A quietly stunning piece of work from a small studio that knew exactly what it was making.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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