#GAME LIMBO WALKTHROUGH SERIES#
Instead this is a series of challenges focusing on avoidance and manipulation, mixed in with traversal and some gently evolving skills.Īt its simplest, there are patches of long grass to duck into and rock channels to sneak under as you learn enemy patrols - generally limited to a single screen or so - and look for openings. Combat is absolutely not an option, which is an excellent choice for the game since it sharpens the design beautifully. And black goop too - part of the invasion? Something different? Something useful? Let's see.Įscaping these alien threats means running left to right and navigating a series of puzzles, most of which revolve around stealth, as you sneak past those human-sized robot killing machines. Sadly, invaders are on the way, black metallic ships with cages for capturing people, huge tankers on legs that are presumably here to drink all that water and process all that wood, smaller units that rove around at the human level killing anyone they see. Everything is artful chunks of rock, little rivers, and backdrops that scroll and suggest that this paradise goes on as far as we can see. The game starts off in a delightful bucolic community where people live off the land and wear smocks and build houses on stilts out of wood.
Watch on YouTube Planet of Lana launch trailer. And over time I think it became something more too.
#GAME LIMBO WALKTHROUGH FREE#
It's meant to be elegantly done, and smartly detailed, and free of frustrations. We're so familiar with what they do and how they work that the eyes have a chance to shift focus a bit, and notice those little marks of cleverness and lightly-applied skill - sunshine playing on grass, grass shifting in the breeze, breeze stirring the soundtrack and beckoning you forward from one ideally conceived encounter to the next.Īll of which is to say that nothing in Planet of Lana is really a surprise, but I'm not sure it's meant to be a surprise. Just as all of, say, Wedgwood's crowd knew what to expect from a bowl, so they could then judge that the Wedgwood bowl was just that little bit more refined in every way, modern audiences are familiar with 2D cinematic platformers. In this way, the 2D cinematic platformer is perfect. Making something, perhaps, where the creation of excellence is the central impulse, winning out over specific mechanics to be explored or a story that simply has to be told. This is the masterpiece in the sense of making something self-consciously excellent.
Not masterpieces in the modern usage of the word perhaps, but in the old sense - I may have this wrong but let's go with it for now - of the piece of work someone makes to show to the world that they are very good at something. the world is being over-run by horrors! Escape if you can! All good, but traditions can be surprising, and as I played Planet of Lana I found myself thinking a little bit about the idea of masterpieces.
The genre stuff alone is enough is to slot this in alongside games like Inside and Somerville - games with which it also shares an apocalyptic focus. Traditions, though? That makes it much more intriguing. When it comes to genre, Planet of Lana is very easy to pinpoint: it's a 2D side scrolling puzzle platformer, more specifically one that focuses on stealth and cinematic storytelling. Sometimes it's interesting to put genre aside and think in terms of traditions. A beautifully crafted side-scroller with a restless puzzle imagination.
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