14 DAY TRIAL // 
Lifeless Planet is a crowdfunded indie adventure game that has you explore a desolate planet, in hopes of uncovering its mysteries and making your way back home to Earth. You are part of a one-way colonization mission, on your way to a distant planet, bustling with life and capable of becoming humankind's next home.
Story
You start out disoriented, realizing that you're trapped in the middle of nowhere, in a hostile wasteland, instead of the lush paradise that was promised to you.
Having no idea what's going on, you begin making your way across the endless waste, hoping to find out what happened to the once-vibrant planet and to your fellow expedition members.
Although in the beginning you consider the option that your entire mission is a giant hoax, a test meant to see how you react when things go awry, the journey soon has you come across a deserted Russian settlement, where the omens of wrongdoing start ringing alarm bells in your head, and you start believing that something terrible happened to the planet's inhabitants.
Making your way across the rocky flats and hilltops, you encounter an eerie young woman, and you start piecing together the clues left behind by the Russian settlers, gathering information on the abrupt decline of all life on the once-teeming planet.
Coming upon various instances of odd happenings, you realize the horrific truth: the Russians carried with them a virus that preyed on the local ecosystem, and soon all native life forms went extinct or adapted, mutating in horrendous ways and striking back at the settlers.
Your oxygen supplies are dwindling, and your only guidance comes in the form of a mysterious Russian woman, who herself seems to have somehow mutated, being able to breathe in the toxic atmosphere and to withstand the harsh environment without any protective gear.
Her footsteps seem to interact with some sort of plankton on the planet's surface, instilling a green luminescence into everything that she treads on, and highlighting the way to your escape. Her motives are unclear, but as she is your last hope of ever making it out alive, you are forced to follow her.
Gameplay
Right off the bat, the game's setting is a superb classic science fiction fantasy scenario, looking like a page torn out of an Arthur C. Clarke of Stanislaw Lem book.
The game's appeal is undeniable, but, unfortunately, it fails to deliver a meaningful experience, and as you progress through it, you end up feeling somehow cheated.
Your in-game toon only seldomly speaks his mind, making for a boring journey of hopping across a very linear path that has been weaved before you.
In all intents and purposes, the game is a platformer that occasionally throws some simple puzzles at you, and although there is an illusion of freedom in the beginning, it is soon shattered by the narrow corridor you have to follow while playing Lifeless Planet.
Although setting out to offer that anxious atmosphere present in the great sci-fi books of old, with man facing the unknown and the vast and strange nothingness of space and struggling to cope with the solitude of life, its essence when stripped of all ego and worldly tribulations, the game merely provides a somewhat bland and blank canvas.
There is no meditation here, no attempt at meaningful introspection when confronted with the reality revealed by Carl Sagan's famed pale blue dot, no comment regarding the aggregate of our fears and our joys, all our perceived glory amounting to nothing, a mere mote of dust in the universe.
Granted, the meaning of life is not something that can be easily tackled, but what good is a barren landscape if not for soul searching?
Lifeless Planet dabbles in a bit of that, but the game could have benefited from much more narrative, especially when it comes to the stories of the dead people you come across. Failing to convey their stories, their hopes and fears, and enthralling us with their tumultuous experiences on a foreign planet is one of the game's biggest detractors.
Hopping around an unknown planet is something that is naturally appealing to most platforming fans, and the exploration of the new world is its own reward in a sense, but the vistas you are regaled with are lackluster, with very few exceptions.
Your main activity in the game is hopping from place to place, visiting various desolate environments, and picking up scarce clues. Everything is conveniently placed within jumping range, and from time to time, some scripted events have you rushing for an oxygen tank or some jetpack fuel.
True, when you do get the jetpack fuel and the ability to activate your jets several times while jumping, the game becomes quite fun, having to time your movements so you get the right altitude and velocity in order to reach distant spots and achieve progress.
But you don't have to manage anything, and you can't really get lost, in most cases you simply have to follow the path that has been laid before you, without any chance of experimentation. When you reach a certain point, the game informs you that you have run out of fuel, no matter how much you have spent, in order to shift from wider gaps to more narrow ones that you can cross with the help of the default single jet burst.
The puzzles are also very easy and feel as contrived as they can get, whenever there's a higher area that you can't normally reach, you'll also find a boulder nearby to push in the right position, and, a tad amusing, whenever your way is blocked, all you have to do is search behind some rocks and you'll find that someone conveniently left some dynamite just lying around.
Visuals and sound
The game's visuals are at the same time secondary to its true purpose, and also an integral part of the entire experience it aims to present.
Having state-of-the-art graphics is nice, but not as important as having the right tone to the entire journey you are trying to offer players, trekking on a distant planet.
An exploration of the cosmic wilderness relies heavily on atmosphere and pacing, on uncovering a brain teaser and then mechanically treading the surface of the planet while your mind roams free exploring its meaning, and that requires an equally riveting or perplexing setting, or at least one that thematically matches the feelings that playing the game evokes in you.
While that is achieved by Lifeless Planet to a certain degree, the level of visual detail is oftentimes lacking, and the compelling and cinematic vistas that one associates with a great ordeal such as the one the protagonist is undergoing are not really there.
There are some pleasing backgrounds and some instances of decent use of textures, but there are many more that simply lack the necessary detail.
There are a couple of levels that feel a bit more lifelike, most notably the hot spring ones, where you can see some coloration in the water, mixing with the red hue of the nearby rocky hills in order to offer a splendid panorama, and in some areas of the lava-ridden region.
But otherwise, the environment is simply not rich enough to deliver the emotional impact that the juxtaposition of extreme beauty and utter despair should convey, and it makes the entire experience seem barren.
That also goes for the sounds in Lifeless Planet, which are quite repetitive in nature and don't complement the atmosphere in any meaningful way.
Lifeless Planet seems to have a ton of potential beneath its lackluster surface, always seeming like a better game is lurking in there, just beyond your grasp.
It unfortunately fails to fully deliver on its atmospheric premise with a lot of drab environments and monotonous action, feeling like not much but a generic platformer that uses its setting as décor instead of telling a proper story.
More focus on the narrative could have greatly improved the experience, providing answers and insight into the strange circumstances of some brave pioneers, a truly exciting premise that the game fails to deliver on.
The mostly silent protagonist is another detracting factor, as a special man in a special conjuncture, faced with desolation and loneliness is bound to offer a compelling introspective journey to go with the platforming.
Unfortunately, that never materializes, apart from a couple of few-and-far-between instances, and as a result, the entire experience can't help but feel shallow.
Although there are some enjoyable moments to be had with Lifeless Planet, the mechanical journey cannot replace the soulful itinerary I expected to find while exploring its world.
