What did I just play? No, I want to know what it is I spent about ten hours playing. It's definitely one of the more terrifying games I've ever played, but that's not exactly a good thing. Planet Laika is what doctors show their terminal patients when they have to explain why the electric bill wasn't paid.
It all begins with a group of space dogs flying off to the military dictatorship that is Mars on a science expedition or to take care of some evil space terrorist or something; I don't know (a phrase you'll say a lot should you decide to play this game). And then this shows up. Do you feel your cerebral cortex slowly slitting its wrists? That's a feeling that will continue throughout the whole experience. A lot of it is simply because of how the game looks. Who thought modeling a dog's face onto a human body was a good idea? And who was it that decided to put bloated man-tits on all that? Or suspend it all in fart space from time to time? And that's just the "normal" stuff; you don't want to know what the game's like when it's trying to be scary. And it's not like the dialogue is any better. There's just something...off about each and every sentence. Nothing's ever explained too clearly, and half the sentences feel like one of the words was changed to something completely unrelated to anything that's going on, thus absolutely destroying any meaning I otherwise could have gotten from that sentence. Sometimes, entire sentences seem to be fucked. Don't try stabbing your eyes to escape this fate, either, because the limited instances of voice work will get to you, too.
And the worst part of it all? IT NEVER FUCKING LETS UP. Not once. Not ever. "But oh benevolent King", I can hear you calling, "Surely, the game must let up at some point. It can't just keep getting scarier and scarier; it eventually has to reach a peak." Oh, how I wish I was that naive. I didn't even show you guys the most horrible parts of this game. Just when you think it couldn't possibly get any worse, tentacle rape. Just tentacle rape. Nothing heartw-OK, to be fair, there are a few touching moments in the game. A few. Hell, I can actually count them all on one hand: April having to deal with Laika's insanity early on and Yolanda recounting how she was there to witness her friend (Laika's mom) just up and kill herself in the bathtub. Yes, even when you're in the middle of a genuinely well written story moment, the game still manages to scare. You will never escape it. But if you still don't believe me, go check out the thumbnails to these videos and point to one that doesn't give clowns nightmares.
I'd say that this would be fine if the developers were aiming to create this type of atmosphere, but that would be like excusing what Jack the Ripper did because it was always his intention to eat some girl's internal organs. But let's assume for a second that the prior premise is true. Even then, Planet Laika fails spectacularly, because I never got the vibe that this is what the developer wanted the game to end up like. There's a lot of dialogue about new avatars and alternate personalities (which everybody seems to have) and the number pi and other such nonsense, which, at first, seems random as all hell. But to a trained eye, there's actually some symbolic value in these plot elements (or at least there would be if they were in any other game than this). Only when the game unloads things like the prophet Jeremiah and the Horseman of the Apocalypse (something it actually getswrong) and all the fucking Christmas motifs lying around the city...only then does it become clear that this was supposed to be a Christian story of ultimate good conquering ultimate evil with a hint of overcoming psychological trauma, or something along those lines. With enough of the 1970s to make Space Channel 5 wet its pants. Strange design choice. Even ignoring that, though, the fact that everything looks like some hideous monster creature means this approach was doomed from the start.
I'm not kidding; the game's sick, demented ethos genuinely makes it difficult for the story to succeed on any level. I can't even tell who's supposed to be a good guy and who's supposed to be a bad guy. For a lot of the story, it seems like Dog Tits is supposed to be an antagonist, but then it turns out he's a victim in all this? Even though he was generally causing nightmare shit to happen all over the place for....why was he doing that, exactly? I remember a lot of dialogue about him living in a nightmare, but that doesn't explain why he was walking on ceilings. AND HOW IS THIS THING A BENEVOLENT FIGURE!? This isn't even getting into all the incredibly weird plot tw....you know what? I could have saved myself a lot of time by telling you that the people behind Planet Laika don't really know how to tell a story. There's not even any hint of a narrative arc. Things just happen because the game says they do, and after ten hours of torture, it mercifully ends.
Now after nearly 1000 words lambasting this atrocity, you may be wondering why I haven't said anything about the gameplay. Well, that's because there really isn't a lot to describe. After an introduction that's pretty much just cutscenes and nightmares, you just walk around a very small world (both in terms of design and writing), talking to random NPCs and battling face aliens. (More on that last part in the next paragraph.) Now because the world is small and your access to it often smaller, you'd think that progress in the game would be fairly easy, since you don't have a lot of options to try out. The answer to that is yes and no. Yes, you're limited in what you can do. No, it's not easy to know where you're supposed to go and what you're supposed to do. Even knowing what the NPCs were saying, I still felt like progress was up to dumb luck.
Perfect example: mid way through the game, a creepy little frog creature wants to take you through the looking glass to meet his God. Why, yes, that God is a horrifying abomination against the natural order, but that's not the point. The point is that he's not gonna let you come along unless you accept Christ as your one true savior (despite the fact that this game is the most cogent proof against God that's ever been conceived). Before I divulge the solution, I have to explain that you play as multiple characters throughout the game. Build up enough psychic energy just talking to people, and you get to become another person. Its true worth is in the narrative, so mechanically, it's only used to progress through the game. Like here, for instance! Can you guess which character you're supposed to change into to proceed? The one whom you've never used prior to this and thus would know absolutely nothing about. Duh! Now to be fair to the game, this does serve an important story function in that it finally introduces us to this fucker. But good fucking luck foreshadowing that in the gameplay so that the player knows how to get to this point!
Fortunately, this isn't the only gameplay that Planet Laika offers you. If it was, I'd be using far nastier words throughout this blog. On top of aimless wandering around and....really, just the aimless wandering around, you get some strange sine wave battle system thing. It doesn't show up a lot, but when it does, it's....satisfactory, I guess? You're supposed to launch a ball of psychic energy at your opponent while also using it to reflect their own shots back at them. It's not terribly complex (I won a couple of the battles by simply holding forward and doing nothing else.), but given how rare it shows up, it's fun for a nice distraction. Some of the more important battles in the game even give you some exposition on the characters' many psychological issues, like Persona 4 if it quaffed everything in the sink and the medicine cabinet. But as I've already elaborated on, that description isn't for the best. Mere exposure to the very concept of this game will result in your brains melting out your ears in a desperate attempt at freedom, which probably explains the level of quality the writing demonstrates. Also telling is how this is pretty much the game that killed Quintet; this was their last game before simply vanishing into the aether. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go shit blood to remind myself that I'm still alive.
Review Synopsis
- Have you ever wanted somebody to combine the visuals of the human characters in Toy Story with all the mental stability of a concussion? Of course you haven't! Nobody has!
- No surprise, then, that the story feels like a series of severe psychological traumas barely lumped together under the pretense of something greater.
- Space Pong's alright, though.
Hey, look at that: something almost as terrifying as Planet Laika.
I believe I've covered this before.Remember? No need to drag up the past.
Which is exactly why I'm bringing up the past here. Look, after the cosmic horror show that was Planet Laika, I needed a reason to love Quintet again, and this game....splinters the hell out of that. On the one hand, you have a mediocre, meandering storyline that doesn't explain a helluva lot. On the other hand, you have a great action RPG with some cool levels and really solid combat. Pretty damn tough call to make, but the end result is still a good game.
But not a good story, mind you. It all begins with psychic child Will stepping into a cosmic pocket to speak with the spirit of Gaia. Why? How? These questions (and maybe one other) are only ever addressed about nine tenths into the story. But that's the least of Illusion of Gaia's worries. Instead, it has to worry more about a lack of focus. In addition to speaking with the gods, Will is also tasked with finding some Mystic Statues and finding out what happened to his father, a set of tasks he immediately does nothing about. It's hard to say that Will and company ever take specific actions toward this end. More often than not, they sort of just luck out and happen to be in the right area at the right time. Like here, for instance! Hell, I could probably describe the entire game as merely bouncing around from event to event until the pig dies and it looks like the plot's going somewhere, maybe with the odd meaningless choice thrown in from time to time (although I don't have much of a problem with that). I'm not even entirely sure what the message or theme behind the game is. That all life everywhere is precious and connected to one another? That's the best I could come up with, and if it's there, it's only very barely hinted at, development of said message coming at the ass end of the game. It also doesn't really explain why I'm slapping the shit out of sand worms beneath the Great Wall of China......Wait, why am I beating up sand worms beneath the Great Wall of China?
Better yet, why am I giving Illusion of Gaia such a hard time? The characters populating this world already have it rough. After the Incan Ruins level, everything goes to hell for these poor guys. Two youths have to survive a month at sea, one of their friends turns into a giant fish for all of two minutes, a guy gets rejected, and the pig, man. But what good would this be if the characters were all massively unsympathetic pricks? Still pretty good. Actually, I was supposed to say that the characters are all well written enough that this crisis is averted. For one, they all have pretty well defined personalities. You have Kara fulfilling the Ben role of generally being useless to the expedition; the pragmatic Lilly; and the "I think I'm confusing him with Otacon for absolutely no reason" Neil. All their personalities play off each other in an endearing way that not only helps make the more depressing elements more palatable, but also acts as a Febreeze to the musty pile of compost that is the plot. Sure, it doesn't cover up the smell entirely, but it certainly helps.
You want to cover up that bad smell? You play the game; not experience the story. Hell, some of the dumber story moments may get a pass simply because they lead cool places in terms of the gameplay. For instance, the overly linear story creates an overly linear game.......That's not what I meant to say. Even without the option to move about the world in any meaningful capacity, the world still has a depth to it. Levels wind about and curve back onto themselves, but never feel like they're wasting your time. I'd say part of this is because of the puzzles in store, but really, they're a minor factor in the levels' success. More credit has to go to the mere concept behind these levels being fun, because what's there not to like about a sky dungeon where you flip the level upside down? Or exploring the Great Wall of China, only to end up fighting a dumb sandworm for no real reason? And that's not even getting into collecting all the laboriously placed Red Jewels strewn across the land.
Mainly because the time I would devote to that must instead go toward greater gameplay features, like the combat, IE one of the game's main selling points. (The other is just how goddamn good it looks. Who knew that vibrant colors and fluid animations actually went well together?) What makes it sellable is that you get to transform into a dark knight (why?*); what makes it good is that no matter what, you're going to have a lot of moves with which to brutally murder anything in sight, and perhaps with the exception of the Psycho Dash, you're going to use every last one of them. But even without that variety, I'd still like the combat in this game simply because there's a real weight behind it. I know that sounds like a petty reason to like a game's combat system, but it's true. Each stab of the sword will send Will flying toward his enemy and said enemy flying back about a few feet. It's little touches like those that make me want to engage every enemy I come across. The fact that they vomit up stat increases only sweetens the deal.
Wait, why am I beating up these enemies, again? Back in Soul Blazer a week ago, it was because I was rebuilding the world and fighting off moral corruption of the soul. Here, there's really no explanation given for why I'm stabbing slime puddles or why they explode into staircases. And while I'm at it, how do we live in a world where Earthly city and culture exist long before there's actually an Earth as we know it? What I'm getting at is that this isn't the tightest narrative put to pen. But it is one of the tighter gameplay experiences put to.....uh, controller? Yea, sure, let's go with that. If the two were more in sync, half the words would have been "nnnnnggghhhh" or some other variation of a raw sexual grunt. Instead, we've ended up with a game that I like quite a bit, albeit reluctantly so.
*
Review Synopsis
- Take a pinch of aimless wandering around and add more pointless choices than BioShock Infinite, and you have the story to Illusion of Gaia.
- This is in stark contrast to the fairly refined gameplay experience used to string it all together.
- And dear god, does this game look amazing!
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