PLANET ALPHA

My first honest reaction to PLANET ALPHA was a small, quiet awe. The small Danish studio behind it - essentially one creative vision expanded into a team - built something that genuinely earns the word 'alien'. The opening ten minutes are almost wordless and slow, your unnamed astronaut limping wounded across a dark desert, and I will defend every second of that pacing because the payoff - stepping into a lush, bioluminescent world teeming with creatures going about their own strange lives - lands hard. The camera has this considered habit of pulling back whenever you stop moving, widening to reveal more of the world around you, then snapping back in when you set off again. That one detail tells you everything about the kind of game this is: it wants you to look. The core loop is a 2.5D puzzle-platformer with stealth underpinning most of the threat response. You have no weapons. Your main tools are running, crouching into vegetation, using environmental hazards to redirect robot enemies, and the game's signature mechanic: direct control over the planetary day-night cycle. Shifting time changes the biology of the world around you - certain plants bloom and open at specific hours to provide cover or platforms, architecture shifts, insectoid creatures scatter or emerge. In its best moments this feels genuinely inventive, a systems-level idea with real world-building baked into it. The tragedy is that the mechanic is underused. Critics across the board flagged the same thing: the day-night control should have been the load-bearing pillar of the design, and instead it shows up as a puzzle flourish while the bulk of the game defaults to pattern-memorisation stealth and reflex jumping. The run time is 4-5 hours, and within that the first half is noticeably stronger than the second. Early biomes - jungle canopies, open-sky sections with sky-whales drifting in the parallax distance, insectoid hive tunnels glowing green - are varied and carry their sense of wonder. Later the level design grows repetitive and some sequences tip from 'challenging' into 'cheap', where deaths feel like the game withholding information you couldn't have had. The jump mechanic carries a slight stiffness that becomes most noticeable when precision is demanded, and during the reduced-gravity void sections - a genuinely trippy design choice - ledge grabs can be unreliable. The stealth also suffers from occasional ambiguity around enemy line-of-sight in the 2.5D plane, so you may eat a laser you thought a rock was blocking. None of this is catastrophic, and the generous checkpoint system keeps frustration from boiling over, but it's the gap between the visual ambition and the mechanical execution that holds PLANET ALPHA back from the tier it clearly wants to occupy. For the right player this still matters. If you want a contemplative side-scroller with a genuinely alien atmosphere, zero dialogue, a story told entirely through environmental context, and some of the most committed non-verbal world-building in the genre, PLANET ALPHA delivers something real. The soundtrack wraps around the visuals like it was composed by someone standing inside the game - atmospheric, slightly uneasy, never overbearing. The no-loading-screen design lets the whole planet flow as a single continuous space, which is quietly remarkable. Come in expecting Inside or Limbo and you may leave underwhelmed. Come in expecting a strange, handcrafted place to spend an evening - one that knows its length and ends cleanly - and this world will stay with you longer than its runtime suggests it should.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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