Team17, the independent developer and games label best known for working with games like Overcooked, Yooka-Laylee, and the Worms series, gave us an opportunity to play some of their upcoming titles at their E3 Show Floor Booth. We were given the chance to play Overcooked 2, Mugsters, and Planet Alpha. All of these titles are going to be available on Nintendo Switch and are expected to be released sometime in 2018.
Isolation Amongst the Beauty of Nature and the Stoicism of Technology
The last title we had time to play with was Planet Alpha, a side-scrolling platformer that mixes gameplay elements of stealth and puzzles. The first thing that captured my attention about this game was its stunning presentation. The planet’s native flora and fauna are realized beautifully as your character walks throughout the planet’s various environments. There’s a mixture of realistic and unearthly colors in the greenery and landscapes, as large plants with blue hues sprout from the ground and towering rock formations decorated with flowers and mushrooms float in the distance. Planet Alpha makes spectacular use of lighting as well, providing the game with a sense of depth and scale. Sunlight peers from the top of the canopy onto the ground below you. Stoic robots roam around the planet with menacingly glowing red lights peering from their visors to illuminate the path before them as they search for intruders. The remarkable presentation and atmosphere of Planet Alpha helped capture my attention and continued astounding me at every turn.
Playing through Planet Alpha was just as compelling as it was to admire its environments. You play through the game as a lonely space astronaut who is on this planet for reasons that are unclear. The camera plays a vital role in both presentation and gameplay as it moves to prepare the player for the type of encounter that will unfold. As you walk through the opening environments, the camera pans and zooms out to demonstrate the scale of the world you’re exploring. In anxious stealth situations, the camera moves closer to the character and the threatening robot so the player can better prepare their next move following the robot’s field of view. The camera zoomed out when a giant, mysterious spider-like monster came by to crush a robot in my path, the camera still not being far out enough to capture the massive size of the creature. There were a few puzzle elements in my playthrough that involved pushing an alien egg the size of a small boulder to a better location so I could make a jump, or hide strategically in the grass as I waited for a robot to have their attention captured by something else. The platforming is simple and responsive, making it affable and enjoyable to go through the otherworldly environments.
As the space astronaut explores Planet Alpha, they discover that they have the ability to manipulate the solar cycle of the planet. In certain locations on the planet, the astronaut has the power to cycle through night and day at will. This causes the wildlife, flora, fauna, etc. to be affected radically by the rapid changes in time. The player can use this to their advantage by causing the grass to grow taller so they have more cover for hiding or have a plant grow to full size so they can reach an area that was previously inaccessible. It’s a unique gameplay element that can lead to exciting and distinctive experiences throughout the adventure.
Planet Alpha is being developed by Planet Alpha ApS and published by Team17. There is no confirmed release date for this title but it is expected to release sometime in 2018. Planet Alpha was one of my biggest personal surprises at E3 2018 and I’m looking forward to playing through the complete experience when it’s finally out.
Note: We did not play a demo of Planet Alpha on a Nintendo Switch. This hands-on impression was conducted on a PC with Xbox controllers.
A special thank you to Team17 for the opportunity to play this game at E3 2018.
