Planet Alpha

Simply put, it’s colourful and spectacular, well worth the play-time.

A beautiful experience. Planet Alpha looks like the game that, if Gaudi was alive today, he could have designed. Platforms, stealth and puzzles based on the day-night cycle.

Simple as it may be in its platforming and overall level design, Planet Alpha nevertheless delivers a concise adventure in a highly exotic planet, filled with a variety of beautiful vistas which certainly warrant a visit from platform aficionados (especially those who are tired of pixel art).

Planet Alpha is a sci-fi adventure that is really excellent in itsartistic design, like a true moving fresco, but it's not as effective in everything related to gameplay, with obvious puzzles and imperfect stealth mechanics.

A beautiful, creative and incredibly frustrating platformer. It’s a shame that the most interesting gameplay mechanic – the ability to affect the environment by changing the time of day – plays second fiddle while it should have been the foundation of the game. [11/2018, p.80]

If Planet Alpha is not as good and powerful as Limbo or Inside, it is indeed a gorgeous game with some clever ideas. Without a word, it invites you to a Sci-Fi trip, with some great narration and mechanics, that you should not refuse.

Despite an attractive veneer, Planet Alpha offers rote and shallow platforming. Try Playdead’s Inside instead.

Planet Alpha - 7/10 - {recommend, but not so much} The game is [good, but repetitive]. The game's ambiance is good and has several areas, but it is a relatively repetitive game with the levels (in actions), the graphics of the scenarios could be better, besides that there are sections that you die 100 times to figure out how to get through, with the over time it gets boring, and the story doesn't help, I just finished it myself because I had already done it more than half, but I didn't really feel like finishing. At the end of the day, it's a nice game, but there's a lot better out there, so think twice before you start.

The clunky love child of Inside & Isaac Asimov. While the eclectic sci fi visuals are quite beautiful to look at, the gameplay leaves much to be desired. The overly cluttered landscape make it’s difficult to solve even basic puzzles and it is often too unclear where you are supposed to go. The movement mechanics (jumping & crouching feel janky & usually feels more frustrating than a 2D side scrolling puzzle platformer should be. The time control mechanic is a great concept but mostly falls short in the way it is utilized. The devs obviously had a keen eye for aesthetics, and if you enjoy the prehistoric sci-fi visuals this game is a good value if you can pick it up on sale.

'Planet Alpha' is 2.5D contemplative and interpretative game. You navigate through a colourful world full of beautiful varied alien species and poorly-designed opponents. All you have to do is to keep rushing to the right. The gameplay is overly repetitive until you reach some puzzle. Game design is not that great since I already lost more than five minutes wondering how to solve one dumb puzzle. As you progress through the game, you will quickly realize that 80% of the puzzles use the same repetitive mechanic: pull a block from the left to the right to help you jump to the next area. Camera angle don't change until the very end. Controls are overly simple. Lighting is great but way too intense from time to time. As I said opponents are repetitive too but really easy to get over once you get their mechanics. Soundtrack is truly interesting and as varied as the environments you encounter. Overall, the atmospheres are the real quality of "Planet Alpha", they bring an unsuspected depth and an explosion of emotions in the middle of all the repetitiveness I mentioned.

Don't be fooled by first impressions of "looks nice and enjoyable enough". Yeah the visuals are nice, but it's a very poorly designed game and only gets worse as the game progresses. I'd recommend just watching it on youtube instead. I bought this for $5 and I've never wanted a refund for a game more badly than this. I feel cheated.

Planet Alpha is a brief and eminently forgettable 2.5D platformer. You are an astronaut, alone on some alien planet, and you… uh, well, need to keep going right, because reasons. You see, this is one of those games which has a very vague plot – there’s no dialogue, no voices, and no real context for anything you’re doing. You’re on an alien planet, you are navigating around platforms, and you are trying to avoid being killed by robots (that look like something out of the 1950s) and alien life (which is very pretty). The planet is mostly pretty lush alien plants, but there’s significant underground, lava, and hive sections to keep things varied. Visually, the game is very pretty – this is a really good-looking game, and while the graphics for some things are simple (such as the protagonist, and indeed, some of the terrain), the aesthetic of the game is very good overall, and the backgrounds and alien plants and animals, and even the enemy robots, are all distinctive and vibrant. There’s a lot going on with this game visually, and it does a good job of making itself be good eye candy. The game is very reminiscent of LIMBO and INSIDE – you are some small thing, out in a dangerous world full of scary monsters/enemies who are pursuing you for unclear reasons, and you need to get somewhere because reasons. However, Planet Alpha is even more vague than those games are, and while it is very artsy in the way that it comes back around on itself in the end to give you a little hint of context, it still doesn’t actually make any sense. All of this is backed up by fairly mediocre gameplay. You can move, you can jump, you can pull yourself up ledges and climb up climbable walls – all bog standard fare. The only real “special” mechanic is the ability to move time forward and backwards, which sounds like something out of Braid, but in this game, it is anything but – you are simply changing the environmental lighting, not rewinding or fast forwarding what is going on in the world. Some objects in the environment move around between day and night because reasons, and while the plants opening up or closing makes some sense, the big rocks moving around does not. But whatever, it is a mechanic, right? The problem is that the transition takes a while, so in the end, there’s nothing substantial to it – it isn’t a game like Hue, where you swap back and forth between two versions of a level, but rather a game that simply has you press a button at times to rearrange things. And in fact, this is pretty slow, so you can’t even readily do it to fluidly platform, as you have to wait for things to transition. Thus, this game ends up feeling pretty hollow. It isn’t really memorable in any way, and it doesn’t have anything to say but “Hey! We can make this look pretty!” And it does look reasonably pretty, but I wanted some fun stuff to back up said prettiness. What I got instead was bland gameplay and no meaningful story. I probably won’t remember this game in six months, but I didn’t feel bored while playing it. Still, I never really felt super excited, either, and without any thrills or anything to really hang my hat on, I can’t recommend this.