Journey to the Savage Planet

My purchases from Epic's summer sale last year were great deals at the time (largely thanks to that renewing 10€ coupon combining with already discounted prices). However, three of the four titles I bought got within the next 6 months, if not better, maybe still a more beneficial deals: both Ghostrunner and Journey to the Savage Planet were Prime games of a month and Curse of the Dead Gods turned up on the PC Game Pass later.

Journey to the Savage Planet on Prime also included its Hot Garbage DLC (a bit suspect name but fortunately it's not quite that). The game key was for GOG where the DLC is only a 6 MB download. All it probably does is enable the extra content whose files you have already downloaded -- there's no way it would fit in that download size with the whole new map it adds.

Vibrant action-exploration

This was originally sort of an impulse purchase for me: I had quickly deemed the game a colorful first person action-adventure game and put it on my wishlist to be bought when it got cheap enough. My judgment had been mostly correct but I had not been aware of the over-the-top humor the game has. You can find similar tone in Breathedge and to a lesser degree in The Outer Worlds as well. At least in this one the farce isn't too on the face and mostly the gameplay just involves cartoony silliness. By and large the humor did nothing for me though.

In Journey to the Savage Planet, you're a slavemployee explorer for some company, mapping the galaxy. You scan the local flora and fauna, as well as try to fix your crash landed ship. The planet also has traces of a sentient alien race -- bit of a mystery to unravel among everything else.

Exploration is the main element of the game as well as unlocking new gadgets and movement options to get to them places. There is also action as quite a few of the planet's creatures are hostile. Combat is fairly basic though. Mostly you just shoot them with your laser pistol (which also has a too cumbersome-to-actually-use supercharge). Bigger creatures you need to first dodge to be then able to shoot them in their weakpoint. There are even few boss fights, albeit rather easy.

Fun to 100%

My completionist nature greatly enjoyed Journey. I loved doing and finding everything there was. Once I even managed to "cleverly" get into a hole I apparently wasn't supposed to yet: My multi-jump didn't have enough upgrades to get me back out.

Had I played Journey on Steam, I wouldn't have been as satisfied with it, however: It has achievements that would require playing in co-op as well as on some time-limited mode. The latter doesn't sound particularly fun for this type of game.

Despite Journey probably having been developed with the co-op constantly in mind, it doesn't fortunately show in or hamper one's single player experience -- much anyway. There are a couple of minor annoyances that definitely stem from co-op compliance: You can never pause and the game considers you having died if you quit when not in your ship. You then have to do a corpse run to fetch your dropped stuff when you resume your playthrough.

The developer studio, Typhoon Games, were acquired by Google before the game's release only to get shut down later and absorbed into the company's Stadia arm. I don't know if a sequel for Journey to the Savage Planet is something that should happen (but might due to some former developers having acquired the rights) but at least this game was entertaining enough of an experience.