Journey to the Savage Planet is a 2020 first-person Metroidvania that sold pretty well and was absolutely fantastic if you played it, but strangely there’s a really high chance you’ve never heard of it. It’s a fate all too often reserved for bright, colorful, fun-first games that don’t obey the industry’s furrowed brow of grimdark severity. Well, apart from the ones with Pokémon in them.
Revenge of the Savage Planet takes the explosively bright and cheerful nature of the original and makes it bigger, brighter, bouncier, changes to third-person, and then uses all that to tell a satirical parable of the state of modern capitalism and the games industry. There’s a reason for that latter twist. Developers Raccoon Logic, who were once developers Typhoon Studios, have been through some shit.
At the height of Google’s extravagant and wildly overconfident plans for disastrous streaming service Stadia, the company bought Typhoon as an in-house developer, before unceremoniously “spitting us back out” (as co-founder Alex Hutchinson, former creative director on Far Cry 4 and Assassin’s Creed III says during our hands-on demo) a few months later. In order to retain the rights to their Savage Planet IP, they sold the first game to publishers 505 Games such that they don’t see a penny of its sales, and..
.well, you can see why the game pitches itself as set “in a future knocked off its axis by corporate greed and stupidity.” So it is with quite some triumph that b.