Lovely Planet

My first twenty minutes with Lovely Planet felt like getting lightly trolled by a one-person studio from Delhi. The world looks like a kindergarten art project, soft pastels, flat-shaded polygons, little enemies that are essentially angry geometric shapes, and the upbeat Calum Bowen soundtrack hums along like it belongs in a kart racer. Then a flying apple missed the ground, the level reset instantly, and I understood exactly what kind of game I was actually holding. This is a speedrunning-focused micro-level shooter built around roughly a hundred stages spread across five worlds. The core loop is stripped to the bone: reach the goal post, kill every enemy, don't get hit, don't fall, do it all as fast as possible. Your only tool is a semi-automatic that fires big, slow-moving projectiles with no aiming reticle, so you are constantly leading your shots, reading enemy positions, and committing each stage layout to memory through repetition. There is no story, no ability unlocks, no loadout tinkering. What you get instead is a three-star scoring system that tracks completion, enemy clears, and time simultaneously, giving obsessive players a layered target to chip away at across every level. Restarts are instantaneous, which is the design choice that keeps all of this from feeling punishing in the wrong way, the game wants you to fail fast and try again, not to sit with a loading screen. The difficulty split is where critics fell out sharply, and honestly both camps are right. The first world, Village, eases you in at a reasonable pace. By City, the second world, the game starts throwing apple projectiles that fail the level if they touch the ground before you shoot them, a rule that feels almost deliberately absurd until the rhythm clicks. Later worlds escalate into the kind of twitch-precision gauntlet that will end casual runs entirely. Players who love the language of speedrunning, memorization, frame-level accuracy, shaving milliseconds, will find the game opens into a surprisingly deep obsession. Everyone else will likely bounce off somewhere in the middle and feel vaguely insulted. The lack of a reticle, in particular, has divided people since launch: some see it as elegant design that forces real aim discipline, others see it as a frustration multiplier dressed up as philosophy. The aesthetic works better than its mixed reception suggests. The low-poly, texture-free environments, mostly clean greens and blues, with little floating islands and scattered props like umbrellas and toy planes, have a strange handmade warmth to them. Kanji floats up when you eliminate enemies. The whole thing lands somewhere between Katamari Damacy's visual logic and a Flash game made by someone with genuinely good taste. The soundtrack, upbeat to the point of feeling satirical against the wall of deaths you will accumulate, is one of those small audio pleasures that indie players tend to notice and appreciate. It is not a complex score, but it earns its place. If you need narrative hooks, RPG loops, or anything resembling forward momentum outside of a three-star score screen, this game will feel empty. But if you have ever watched a speedrun and thought about what it would feel like to build that kind of mastery from the ground up, Lovely Planet is a rare thing, a small, quietly confident game that knows exactly what it is and does not apologize for it.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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