Planet of Lana II on Switch: A good enough puzzle platformer

Planet of Lana 2 is one of those games that I probably wouldn't have heard about if it wasn't for some random site like this one where people were speaking about indie games. I am a big fan of supporting indie games and these days in particular, I think that the smaller studios have a better chance of releasing something quality than the big studios do. This has a lot to do with a lot of things but the main one possibly being that the small studios don't feel the pressure to get their product out to market asap. They don't have corporate goons hanging over their backs enforcing impossible deadlines based on ignorance.

This is all just raw speculation on my part, but lately, I have been on an indie kick and Planet of Lana 2 is a game that was never going to get much press.

I played it anyway because it kind of fell in line with other such titles meaning that the actual story in the game is kind of up to you to some degree to determine.

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This is a puzzle-platformer ins 2D. If you are not into that sort of thing I don't think this particular game is likely to change that. I enjoy that sort of thing so this is right up my proverbial alley.

In a lot of games that I enjoy there is no definitively stated plot. This includes favorites of mine such as Inside, Limbo, Little Monsters (not the 2nd one), and one of the OG's Journey.

This warning comes up at the start of the game and I thought this was really cool, especially once the talking in the game starts to take place. You don't know what they are saying, you are not meant to know what they are saying, but you can kind of determine to some degree what is going on by where they move, pictures they look at, and the way in which they communicate with other characters in the game.

We assume that the name of the main character we are playing is Lana, although I don't really remember if this is at all defined during the game.

After about a 2 minute intro with subtitles that wraps up the events of the first game , which I have never played but will, we get thrust into the action and other than the screen telling you how to use the buttons, nary a word of English is spoken to you about where you are going, why you are here, who you must kill, etc. It is pretty clear pretty early on though that a cat-like creature named Mui is your friend, and is going to be instrumental on you progressing through the various puzzles that you will encounter one after the other.

Mui is a magical creature that can utilize some sort of electronic pulse to activate or deactivate certain things in the world you find yourself in. He is also capable of jumping a lot higher than Lana can and this quickly unfolds as a major part of the puzzle solving that you are going to have to do in this game, one stage after the next.

Mui takes to Lana right away although it isn't very clear to me based on my personal interpretation of the story whether or not Mui and Lana actually have a past together. We find out through the story that Mui is actually very old, and was part of the civilized world before Lana was alive and was around when the robot AI or alien something or other decided to turn on their human masters and mostly eliminate their population.

It's determined very early on that Mui hates water and cannot get into it so you have to venture on, on your own, anytime that there is a water hazard in your path. And this is as good a time as any for me to talk about a few of the downsides of this otherwise wonderful title.

you remember how much everyone loves underwater portions of games and how the inability to carry on without getting oxygen is really a lot of fun for everyone involved? Yeah, me neither. I think this is basically universally hated in games. It isn't a massive part of the game aside from one level but herein lies a horrible combination of issues that makes parts of this game exceptionally frustrating. Let me see if I can kick your memory banks a bit if you are an older gamer and ask you if you remember the original Prince of Persia game and how although it was beautiful, it was a horribly frustrating game because of the lag on the input - meaning that you hit the jump button but the actual jump happens half a second later - do you remember that?

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Everyone hated this back in the day but I suppose it was a bit more forgivable 35 years ago when we had really low levels of tech available to us so a bit of an input lag was not only acceptable, but kind of expected. These days on the other hand though, a game that isn't even that big and certainly doesn't actually require the entirety of the processing capabilities of whatever system you are playing it on, should NEVER be this way. Yet Planet of Lana 2 is exactly that. When you hit a jump button or an action button, there is a brief bit of lag before the action actually happens.

This is particularly frustrating when you have very limited time to activate something underwater because you have limited breath before you die.

Take this early encounter for example: if that electo-fish turns around you are toast, if you don't hurry you run out of breath and you are toast. So when the Y button appears at that thing you are near for just a second because you are moving and there is also lag on the button input vs the actual action, it can screw the entire thing up. You don't have to wait a super long time to reload and the checkpoints are very friendly, but it is still a seriously frustrating experience.

The jumps in the game are forgiving but it takes a little while for you to figure out that you have to time your button presses slightly before you actually want to jump otherwise you are going to fall to your death because the system isn't going to initiate the actual jump until after your character has already run off the edge to their death.

Ok, rant over about that: once you figure it out it isn't that much of an issue but this is just one of those oversights that I don't understand how it can make it to the final product seeing as how all the rest of the game is absolutely perfect.

The story, even though you are meant to interpret it on your own, is actually really good. There are instance where, such as the one above, it is seriously up to the individual what is actually going on here. You get the impression that Mui is not a living creature but it a robot of some sort, and he contains a map inside of him that leads whoever can activate it to Earth. And apparently there are some robot type creatures that seem to have ill intentions for enslaving or eliminating the human population there.

Again, this is largely up to the player to interpret and your understanding of it might be very different from my own.

I will go into greater detail about the various levels in future episodes but I think as though I have covered a large part of what this overall game is all about. The controls can be a bit tricky at times because there are instances where you are controlling Mui with the right stick, Lana with the left, and sometime you have to switch back and forth between Lana and something else that he is remote controlling somehow.

None of these puzzles are too perplexing though, and I only had to look up the solution to one single segment of the entire game. I am not a terribly smart person though.

I suspect that anyone that played this game probably can remember this one section because it is one of the only portions of the game that doesn't have a pretty straight-forward solution. Or maybe I am just an idiot. These are both equally possible.

The bottom line is that Planet of Lana 2 is a pretty solid game and it's launch prices of around $20 in my mind, is justified. You can get it for "free" with a number of subscription such as GamePass but I ended up paying around 12 dollars for it during a very rare Nintendo Switch sale.

If you do have access to it, this 3-5 hour puzzle adventure is something that held my attention really well even though the various things you do are very similar in nature because you have a very small moveset and the game is entirely linear.

Tell me what you think if you have played this one

_{all non-credited images are screencaps from my own gameplay}