Planet of the Eyes

My first impression, loading up Planet of the Eyes, was that someone had handed a retro sci-fi paperback to a very talented illustrator and said: make this playable. The visual identity here - flat vector shapes, deep blacks and purples sliced open by orange lava and red laser beams, creatures made of geometry - lands immediately and stays with you. Cococucumber's artist Vanessa Chia built something that sits in a category of its own: not Limbo's oppressive monochrome, not Inside's cinematic realism, but something warmer and stranger. The soundtrack by John Black works the same way - sparse, ambient, occasionally fading into the environmental noise of the alien world until you stop noticing where the music ends and the planet begins. That blurring is intentional, and it works. The game itself is a side-scrolling puzzle platformer with no combat. Your small service robot cannot fight anything. What it can do is run, jump, swim, push crates, flip switches, collect lightning bugs to distract creatures, and die in more than twelve distinct animated ways - a detail that tells you a lot about where the handcraft was invested. Puzzles lean on simple physics: dragging objects, triggering paired switches, using environmental geometry to bypass giant insects and arachnids that block your path. Nothing here will stump a genre veteran for more than a minute. The challenge is light and deliberate - this is a game that wants you moving forward at a steady pace, not grinding against a wall. Generous checkpoints placed right before every significant obstacle mean frustration barely gets a foothold, which is the correct design choice for an experience this short. The story is told through fully voiced audio logs left by the robot's creator, written by Will O'Neill and voiced by Alex Lewis. The logs are brief, a few sentences each, and they sketch a melancholy relationship between a lonely ship worker and the AI he built for company. It is not a complex narrative - some reviewers have found the ending underdelivers on the mystery the world sets up, and that criticism is fair. The alien ruins visible in the background hint at a civilisation the story never really interrogates. The planet's eyes - those watching shapes in the rock and vegetation that give the game its name - accumulate into something atmospheric rather than something explained. Whether that feels like poetic restraint or a missed opportunity depends entirely on your temperament. Runtime is the honest sticking point. Most players finish in ninety minutes to two hours. There is no replayability to speak of beyond the achievement list, and the audio logs are placed in plain sight along the critical path rather than tucked into optional detours. The final act shows some visual roughness compared to the earlier environments - crudely drawn platforms creep in where the earlier stages had careful geometry. Controls have been called mushy by some reviewers and fluid by others, which suggests the controller experience and keyboard experience may differ enough to notice. I would lean toward a controller here. Where I land: this is a game that knows exactly what it is. It is the gaming equivalent of a short story - complete, considered, and not interested in padding its word count. The mood it creates in ninety minutes is more coherent than what most atmospheric platformers achieve in six hours. The questions it leaves unanswered feel less like laziness and more like the restraint of a developer who understood that unexplained strangeness is often more affecting than exposition. If you need density, replay value, or a challenge that respects your skill ceiling, look elsewhere. If you want a quiet, beautifully designed hour and a half with a soundtrack that sounds like it was recorded on a distant moon, this deserves your attention.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on Planet of the Eyes.