Many games try to capture the wonder of stepping foot onto unknown terrain, ready to survey a mysterious, faraway world brimming with life and flora. Beautiful landscapes to admire. Alien secrets to uncover. Danger lurking around any corner.

Few of them then immediately encourage the player to soccer kick a stout, cartoonishly round bird-like creature to watch it fly helplessly through the air then pop in a smattering of goo ending in a satisfying *splat*.

Then again, not every game is Journey to the Savage Planet.

An interaction like this embodies what the first game from Typhoon Studios is: a colorful, hilarious trek across a new planet where the player surveys a host of living organisms, traverses multiple biospheres, confronts different wildlife and ultimately seeks the hidden messages of a foreign world. It’s a mostly satisfying type of adventure game, albeit subtly flawed and reveals itself to be more conventional as it progresses, that doesn’t take itself too seriously and is much better for it.

The first-person adventure game is set in a galaxy where Kindred Aerospace, which dubs itself the 4th Best Interstellar Exploration company, sends a spanking new recruit to explore potential planets for humans to inhabit. Its gameplay is a combination of strolling around and platforming across environments in four bespoke biomes on a planet called AR-Y 26. The player scans its surroundings and discovers world items to build up a codex, a knowledge base for profiling the unfamiliar habitat. There’s also combat against hostile creatures and even boss enemies, as the player is equipped with a cool, laser Nomad Pistol plus thrown items like bait bottles and plant bombs.

It’s humorous and clever from the beginning, especially in its presentation of how Kindred communicates with its lonely recruit so far from home. Typhoon leverages full motion video capture to beam messages from Kindred CEO Martin Tweed or wacky infomercials for futuristic products such as Brain Wipes, advertised as tissues for one’s cerebral that can wipe away a bad mood. This format, along with other touches I’ll mention later, represent the game’s personality as a comical commentary on capitalism and the expendibility of its corporate worker bees.

Since it’s such a compact map with distinct areas to explore, diverting one’s attention or experimenting is rewarding. Nothing ever takes too long, then it’s on to the next thing that piques my interest. While there are traditional missions and even side quests, these aren’t as fun as going off in a direction just to see what’s there.

While the best parts of the game are its distractions, there are technically a couple main goals. The kinds of objectives that serve to push its more nebulous narrative forward. Our artificial intelligence companion EKO tells us we’ve crash landed so naturally we need to repair our ship, the Javelin, then find enough fuel to eventually make a return trip to Earth. You know, a classic video game MacGuffin. The other much more intriguing task is Kindred’s assignment for us to document everything on AR-Y 26 by building up a Kindrex, our handy master list of alien life and mysterious artifacts.

Oh. There’s also the massive floating tower scraping the sky that dominates the horizon, which ends up being the infatuation of Kindred’s CEO. He has to know what’s inside, regardless of how perilous of a predicament it becomes for his employee.

The game’s initial areas, the Landing Site and Itching Fields, reveal there’s all sorts of weird stuff to see and interact with across wintry tundras, jungle climates and poisonous swamps. The standout here is its variety as we progress upward toward the tower. Animals with silly species names like Pufferbird, the fat little guys I splattered before, and the carnivorous shrub known as a Meat Vortex. There’s shrubbery like the Vitality Plant, which drop seeds that help us survive. Bombegranates have, well, bombs that explode when we chuck them. There are sections with exotic, ominous titles like Chamber of Intrigue and Towering Crystals of Madness. Collectibles pop up in the form of scannable statues, hinting that we aren’t the first visitor to this fertile land.

Journey to the Savage Planet is built on this foundation of discovery and cohesiveness. These kinds of terms and their corresponding descriptions in the Kindrex establish the game’s eternal charm. It often breaks the fourth wall in clever ways, while also tying these kinds of comments back to its universe. Even pop-up text for achievements and trophies earned along the way are quips. Typhoon absolutely nails the general identity, complete with cheery music and subtle flourishes.

Shifting to mechanics, our core loop is exploring, scanning, fighting when necessary then claiming rewards in the form of materials that build upgrades to allow access to the next broader area. As many games do these days, Journey to the Savage Planet has “Metroidvania” elements in grappling points or cracked walls that can only be accessed via specific abilities. I’ve come to expect this in most modern titles, and while temporarily frustrating to a completionist like myself, I mostly appreciate them enticing me back towards new slices of familiar areas.

Naturally, there are plenty of powerful upgrades to build out the character page. It’s a much more robust system than I expected. The Proton Tether allows grappling and really opens up the traversal to being way more fun than the first section. A more powerful iteration allows travel on ziplines. Seriously, who doesn’t love that moment when you can finally ride the zipline you’ve been eyeing all game?

Jump Thrusters add to mobility and enable double, triple and even quadruple jumps later game. A better helmet scanner highlights where the most hidden of items dwell, a favorite of collectors like yours truly. Damage, reload and charge boosts for our trusty handgun make beating up baddies easier, which is welcome because the game’s combat is pedestrian as I’ll expand on soon.

While I wouldn’t call its ability system anything revolutionary, I dig Typhoon’s plan here for a sense of progression without applying a character level or experience bar. Mechanics progress at the same pace as discovery of the world and its peculiar history, mainly because expanding on them allows for access to previously obstructed paths.

Operating in unison with a humorous approach to, well, mostly everything is its stunning visual aesthetic. Typhoon’s tenets here are a beautiful color palette, creative creature design and variety of sensory effects. This is the game’s most obvious strength that’s easy to convey. Just look at it!

Each biome has a distinct personality that’s communicated via its look, combining scenery, animal styles and plant design.

Its smallest creatures remind me of Halo grunts, except friendlier and covered in a coat of bright paint. There are also loud, multi-headed animals that split into two unique bodies after being hit, like a cell dividing itself. Then there’s larger more aggressive species like Pikemanders and Slamphibians, the latter of which some grotesque blend of frog and primate.

As I worked my way upwards toward later chapters, I encountered hallucinogenic plants and bubbling Orange Pods that increased health and stamina when eaten. Some flora spray seeds when damaged, not all of them helpful as I found out by slapping one filled with acid. Animals drop materials that are sucked up magnetically a la Ratchet and Clank. Honestly, just the collecting itself is satisfying. It doesn’t have to make sense. It’s a video game after all.

Speaking of, there are light puzzle elements. Mini areas that require stealth or tricky platforming, both of which can be finicky unfortunately. Each area even culminates in a boss with its own mechanics, like having to hit weak points while dodging dangerous attacks or grappling up ledges to hit the perfect angle from which to fight. It works well enough, even if I occasionally struggled with controls or aiming.

The coolest part of Journey to the Savage Planet is how Typhoon designed everything to fit together and amid the type of corporate universe in which it exists. Items like Grob, an amorphous matter that can be constructed into food. Or how fast travel is actually the ship’s artificial intelligence transcribing the player’s consciousnesses onto a new body (As EKO tells it, we’re supposed to consider it “teleporting”).

There’s slick animation when the player stretches after waking up on the ship or collects samples from an ancient effigy. Seemingly small moments that define its satirical tone. Like how there are periodic “progress reports” from Kindred, which track the player’s actual statistics and ask personal questions about the trip. It’s all a part of the experience.

The attention to detail, its visual styling and the level of care put into each unique design that shows me that the team at Typhoon was clearly having a ton of fun during development, which inspires me to find all that its game has to offer.

Honestly, I think I had more fun being distracted than actually moving towards the finale. We’re meant to do silly things. And fail along the way. There’s even an achievement for scanning one’s dead body after being reincarnated. Since it’s such a compact map with distinct areas to explore, diverting one’s attention or experimenting is rewarding. Nothing ever takes too long, then it’s on to the next thing that piques my interest. While there are traditional missions and even side quests, these aren’t as fun as going off in a direction just to see what’s there.

All the collecting and scanning builds its lore, since the best storytelling Typhoon does is indirect. We’re learning from in-game items that we might not be the first traveler to embark on such a tour, which ties into later game happenings for those paying close attention to the documents and videos.

As enjoyable as its exploration and world-building, not all edges in Journey to the Savage Planet are of the smooth variety.

Side quests are forgettable and exist for the sole purpose of filing out the upgrade tree. As are “science challenges” that lock the best stuff behind a set of hyper-specific tasks like shocking a large number of enemies or jumping from a height without dying. I wouldn’t call them fun, though they encouraged more unique combat approaches. A couple in the final group are plain annoying and arduous. The most frustrating part is knowing that the coolest upgrades can’t be seen until trying over and over to accomplish the exact task.

Combat itself is, well, decent enough to get the job done but nowhere near the highlight. Like the first BioShock except with only one weapon and throwables in the left hand as opposed to cool Plasmid powers. There’s often too much of it, which results from enemies becoming hyper-aggressive once the fight begins. Since it’s not the game’s strongest suit, it can be strenuous to have a dozen animals screaming towards you when all you want to do is scan a new collectible. In the back half, I found myself avoiding conflict more than seeking it.

Swapping over to quality of life and accessibility touches, Journey to the Savage Planet is immensely inconsistent. This is disappointing in an era where so many games focus on flexibility.

Fast travel works mostly well, except loading times are just a bit too long when moving between areas rather than within one. I did experience a bug where I couldn’t unlock one of the teleporters, which kept me from completing the set. My hunch is that there’s a combat sequence before it that failed to load, because there’s a comparable encounter at another device.

Controller mapping is nonexistent as it stands pre-release, and the options that are present don’t feel natural especially for the sake of combat. It’s 2020. I firmly believe every game should incorporate a level of customization in button mapping. The more options, the better. And there aren’t many here.

Certain parts of the menu are only accessible back on the Javelin computer, like alien logs and completion statistics. It would have benefited from a sort of wristwatch that could pull these up at will. Especially because so much of the game is about knocking out items on a checklist, I’d prefer an easier way to keep track of my progress or see the collectibles I’ve found.

As mentioned before, its narrative is ambiguous. Which isn’t a sort of major negative, it just left me wanting. There’s not much dialogue. It’s a lonely game where the player is the main and only character on the planet. Which means I didn’t learn about myself, if that makes sense. Part of it is, this is going to be super specific, the protagonist never really communicates back to Kindred or EKO. Perhaps this is because I chose to be a dog, granted. I’m curious if it changes as a human. Even so, what it lacks in story and character development it makes up for in many other areas.

Operating in unison with the humorous approach to, well, mostly everything is its stunning visual aesthetic. Typhoon’s tenets here are a beautiful color palette, creative creature design and variety of sensory effects. This is the game’s most obvious strength that’s easy to convey. Just look at it!

From a technical standpoint, I’d call it sufficient though I will admit I was disappointed that it crashed three times during my approximately fifteen hours with the Xbox One X version. It even turned off my console, which is unacceptable. Each time I was surrounded by enemies and an explosion happened. Perhaps the engine couldn’t process all at once. It’s a rare occasion when a hard crash results in forcing the console to shut down. This is the type of thing that could be resolved by a future patch, yet I’d be remiss not to report it.

Plus side, I will say, having a photo mode in the pre-launch patch is an excellent feature. It showcases the game’s broader beauty that might be missed from the first-person perspective. Every game is better with one, even if basic in its functionality. I stand by it.

In general, the more I played, the more conventional it started to feel. It’s a quite good, compact experience. I can’t argue it’s doing anything overly innovative or supremely special that I have to drop everything and share a clip or text a friend. While perhaps this limits its potential to stand-out over a longer term, there’s still plenty of fun in the moment.

These aside, I truly had a mostly good time figuring out what the heck was going on in this unique world teeming with life. One note, I wasn’t able to try co-op play before release. There’s a two-player online mode where friends (or enemies I guess, if you so choose) can share in the adventure. The host of the session retains materials, upgrades etc that can apply to their individual save, the guest unfortunately does not. This isn’t uncommon in co-op modes. I can see this being a fun way to experience its silliness, perhaps with a sibling or child.

Journey to the Savage Planet is led by Typhoon Studios co-founders Alex Hutchinson and Reid Schneider, and all throughout it’s clearly a project crafted by a small team of close-knit developers. Because it feels intimate and personal despite its otherworldly setting. It’s genuinely funny. It’s eye-catching in its landscapes. It’s goofy, encouraging and not afraid to let the player stumble into hi-jinks.

Vivid presentation and amusing tone are what caught my attention when I saw it. I’m happy to report these carry through as its best attributes. I’ll remember it most for how much care its designers took to make me chuckle each time I read a passage or engaged with a new species.

It’s the type of adventure that fulfills what the word promises, partly because its combat and narrative aren’t the focus though more because its experience really is the story. That sense of not knowing what I’ll see and making the trip anyway, because I’ve got a hunch I’ll always spot something new.

Title: Journey to the Savage Planet

Release Date: January 28, 2020

Developer: Typhoon Studios

Publisher: 505 Games

Platforms: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC (Epic Games Store Exclusive).

Recommendation: If you like to explore and laugh along the way, this is your game. Don’t expect to be blown away by engaging combat or a gripping tale, and be ready for rough edges and the potential for it to crash once or twice. It’s an experience, albeit a goofy one, that’s worth having. Also, it might be the first and only time a Typhoon game is on platforms other than Stadia, since the studio was purchased by Google back in December.

Sources: 505 Games, Google, Certain screenshots on Xbox One X.

Disclaimer: Review code provided courtesy of 505 Games.

-Dom