Revenge of the Savage Planet: beautifully animated nonsense

The protagonist in Revenge of the Savage Planet is a goofy, bobble-headed lanky klutz who runs like a Looney Tune and isn’t averse to chaotically slipping and sliding about the game’s sprightly-coloured alien worlds on patches of alien slime. (There’s good reason why developer Racoon Logic asked comic artist Duncan Fegredo to paint the game’s poster art.)

The player character’s run is gangly and snappy, the legs zip to their arc’s peak, pause fractionally to sell the moment and zap back down and up. Slipping is a chaotic mess of limbs and gliding is a serene, satisfying dangle of limp legs. In motion, just watching your playable character move raises a smile. And that’s the point, Revenge of the Savage Planet uses all the animation know-how in the book to sell its humour.

The world of Revenge of the Savage Planet is just as fun and wonderfully detailed. Built in Unreal Engine 5, the game’s environments feels alive and complex. In my demo, Reid Schneider, Raccoon Logic’s studio head and co-founder, takes me on a tour of two of the game’s ‘savage planets’, one an acid-green forest layered with pink-leafed trees and a desert world that manages to splash colour into its sandy nooks.

As the first jungle world opens up I see just how much attention is being paid to the smallest details, and how much the developer is revelling in its absurdity. There are exploding turd-trees, gooey jelly creatures that flop and flap as they’re shot, and brain plants that unfurl to act as springboards to new areas. As colourful as the world is, it’s also physical and satisfyingly tactile.

Revenge of the Savage Planet: exploring comedy

So now we have two pillars, a protagonist that’s a joy to spend time with and a world that’s ripe for exploration. So what do you do in Revenge of the Savage Planet? Essentially, it’s a game that celebrates its main strengths and challenges you to explore these worlds, scanning life forms, shooting critters and gathering resources to craft new gadgets to open up the world to more exploration, blasting and gathering.

Underpinning everything, and setting itself apart from the norm, is that wacky humour. While other games celebrate the pursuit of capitalism in space exploration, forcing you to gather resources and build empires, Raccoon Logic’s take is a cynical-side-eye at what has become the norm. Having decided space exploration is too costly with low rewards, your character has been laid off while in cryosleep, so they awake on an alien world jobless and redundant… until a new paymaster needs a desperate recruit.

The comparison with Raccoon Logic’s own position isn’t lost on those who know; the team were formerly Typhoon Studios, a Google studio that made the previous game, Journey to the Savage Planet, before being closed, only to come back together anew as a smaller indie team, Raccoon Logic, and make this sequel. The constant layoffs and closures currently affecting the games industry is another inspiration for the satire.

The fact Raccoon Logic can make its message land while also delivering physical comedy and jokes about flaccid laser lassos shows the deft touch the team has for its messaging and animation. There are layers to Revenge of the Savage Planet that I can see being a joy to unpick.

There are also layers to the game’s world design that shine in my demo. It’s said that good level design is about distracting you from your goals, teasing you off the beaten path with new rewards. It’s something Revenge of the Savage Planet is doing incredibly well.

As the action relocates to the new desert planet the tone is Spaceballs more than Star Wars, and features aliens that look like “rejects from a 90s animated movie, A Bugs Life or Antz,” says Reid. This insect-like alien in question spins like a dusty whirling dervish before pausing to fire off its blaster. Like everything I’ve seen, this spindly creature is beautifully animated. There are literal sand sharks beneath the dunes and large softly furred hopping mice-like creatures that bound past the game’s camera – the world feels alive.

But distraction comes as Reid shows off one of the game’s unique puzzles. On the horizon we see an arched rocky structure, covered in green slime but the bulk of the formation is hazy, invisible. Using one of the game’s many gadgets Reid shows how shooting slime over the scene begins to reveal its form, uncovering a hidden entrance to a cloaked cave and inside a chest with a secret. As with everything in the demo, this looks as good as it plays.

This sandy planet looks wide and open in design but other planets feature different focuses, as Reid says there’s an ice-volcano planet with over 500 meters of verticality and there are retro game inspired design choices, such as the inclusion of three large boss battles with dedicated arenas.

Revenge of the Savage Planet has found its voice

Herein lies the balance being pitched with Revenge of the Savage Planet, it’s both a visually arresting game that offers unusual alien worlds ripe for exploration while underpinning everything with biting satire and broad comedy.

And we’re back to simply enjoying moving in the game, watching the protagonist slide on slime (at one point the character shoots slime out ahead of himself to slip down dunes and slopes, alluding to the physics-based game design) and running in a gangly, chaotic ‘knees-up’ manner through deep water (animation that’s inspired by the Californian surf running subculture).

Games that make you laugh and few and far between; it’s much easier to sell sorrow than slapstick. Racoon Logic made the bold choices of using its own trauma to tell a story while shifting the game from first-person, found in the previous game Journey to the Savage Planet, to third-person. In doing so the team has found the game’s bittersweet comedy gold, more than any hidden chest could offer.

Inspired by Revenge of the Savage Planet? Then read our guides to the best animation software and the best 2D animation software and get creating.