August 14, 2020
Lovely Planet was developed by Vidhvat, with music by Calum Bowen. I got it in 2014, about 2 months after it came out. Just recently I 100%ed the game. Obviously it was a waste of time like every gaming achievement, but, you know.
I love this game, even for its faults. Like, the first two worlds do a good enough job teaching the basic mechanics, but they still present the game as a straightforward FPS with some tasteful programmer art, and then somewhere around the third world1, the point of the game shifts to assimilating pre-determined sequence of moves into your hands to shave fractions of seconds off your time. A lot of the user reviews, especially early on, felt this spike in the curve was a betrayal, and as a result, a lot of players didn't get to experience most of the game. Would they have been able to accept it if the game were up front about its fixations? Idk maybe. If you push through it, and accept it, and have the mental defects that typify the True Gamer, allowing you to try the attack a challenge dozens or hundreds of times, you can feel Lovely Planet changing you, like you grow new little organs inside your body. Actually this is one of those games where RSI is a real possibilty so maybe that's meant literally. And funnily enough the game ends up teaching you the skills to make significant sequence breaks from the expected order of moves, including in the final levels. These are shortcuts that the developer couldn't have predicted or tested for, even though some of them are obvious with a little experimentation, because he made such an idiosyncratic game with such a narrow focus that how many other people would be able to attack it like that with fresh eyes?
Lovely Planet's style is incredible. Sound design, other than Bowen's Katamari-flavored music, sounds just a bit off, all the effects not quite randomly pulled from from stock sound packs. The story feels like a spiritual journey of some kind, but to get a deeper understanding of it you have to speak phrasebook Japanese and catch the references to Akira Kurosawa films I haven't seen. The visual art is restrained, serviceable, and perfect for itself, but on occasion surprisingly affective.
There's been three other games in the "series" since then, which I'll get to. My backlog is enormous. I feel like a hardly play games now. It's not that I don't have the time, which is what adults say. I just feel like I have to have a reason for playing games, but that's futile, because the point of games and art and things of that nature, is that there isn't a definite reason why.
Hey, check out the speedrun of this game.
1Or actually I think it's at level 2-13, "Staircase," in which the game first asks you to make a precise, quick shot at a target 180 degrees from the direction you want to jump. Probably realizing that it's finally pushing the player out of the nest, the level begins with a message of love.