The Planet Crafter
Sub-not-ica
Planet Crafter is a survival game where you get dumped onto a barren planet and have to terraform it to work off an unexplained prison sentence. It recently came out of early access and it's all the rage on Twitch and YouTube. I played it and finished it, so I’m going to write about it.
You build machines that let you build bigger machines that grow grass and let you build even bigger machines and eventually go home. There's a vague spacepunk dystopia theme that's conveyed almost entirely by the fact that the people who want to colonise this planet are called "Sentinel Corp" and email you in PR speak. It's a good, basic premise.
It was fun! ...for the most part. It's got glaring flaws. The biggest one is a worrying revelation about my own mind, but we'll get to that.
Let's look at those flaws first, because I'm always happiest when I'm being miserable about something. The early stages of terraforming come quick and easy, but the endgame gets grindy and bloated, at least in singleplayer. In the first hour or two, the sky turns from an angry red to a beautiful blue, clouds slowly form, you get rain and some little ponds, it's all very exciting.
The game decides this is too much fun and gradually applies resistance until by the end it feels like you're waiting forever for something to happen. Going on aimless little excursions around the map and staring at frogs while the progress bar ticks forward because you've built as many bug farms as you can stand and the supply droids are feeding your horrible mutant servants, so there's nothing more to do. I imagine this would be solved by playing it with nine other people, but as a singleplayer experience it leaves something to be desired.
Planet Crafter is held together with sellotape. You can literally see the seams in the landscape half the time, see through it into the abyss at other points, and the final stages feel like they were thrown together in a hurry when they realised the deadline was coming up. I don't know anything about the developer, but I wouldn't be surprised if this was their first game. There's virtually no polish. It bears all the hallmarks of a dev cycle that ended with the words "Fuck it, we can add stuff in patches, we need to ship."
I mentioned mutant servants earlier, those are the friendly animals that eventually pop up as you build late game DNA splicing machines. I think they're meant to be majestic or cute, but they stutter around the landscape looking like something from a Spore beta test that was accidentally released for the PS2. As I stared at a massive deer struggling to eat grass while twitching around like a myxomatosis-stricken rabbit, I felt less like a benevolent lifebringer and more like a cruel god. This is what I mean by unpolished and rushed.
The story is absolutely pathetic, with an unsatisfying nothing ending. (SPOILERS: Some aliens were here before and left messages, they were sad and the game wants you to be moved. You won’t be.) The plot in particular shows off a shocking tendency to try things that Subnautica does but without the ability or understanding of how to make it interesting. It constantly blurs the line between homage/inspiration and cheap ripoff. I've written before about how Subnautica tells its story in an interesting and unique way. This isn't that. I’ve seen positive comparisons between the two, and putting it politely I think it shows that gamers are media illiterate.
All that being said, and I know it's a lot being said, I got strangely obsessed with it. I played *too many* hours every day. The terraforming is so genuinely satisfying and I loved watching the planet change around me as the wheels of industry turned. As you build up and improve your base, the world noticably (if eventually very slowly) transforms from a deadly, hostile rock into a lush utopia.
This gameplay loop is the one thing the game does fantastically, and it deserved more attention and nuance. It's a bespoke, non randomly generated world, so they could have had more to explore, more to populate. Dump the plot and the wrecks and the data logs and the stupid portal dungeon system, focus on the bits that are unique to you and do those well. As it is, it leaves the terraforming feeling unfinished in the interest of doing more things that Subnautica does better.
I don't use the word obsessed lightly by the way. I said at the very beginning that this game revealed something worrying about my brain, and that revelation is that this sort of game can get me sickeningly addicted. I don't know if I've ever been hooked by something to the same extent. I played over 10 hours in one sitting, and stayed up almost all night in another sitting. I know that's routine for certain people, but it absolutely isn't for me. I value sleep and the ability to zone out for long stretches of time.
The numbers constantly getting bigger and bigger, paired with the visual and mechanical changes, wormed some sort of horrible tendril into my brain that meant I couldn't stay away from it. There was always one more thing to do if I just waited another hour for the next stage of terraformation. If you had asked me if I was having fun, I would have replied "Yeah, I guess so. It's alright." As I sank another three hours into it, curtains closed to the rest of the world, neglecting real world interests and chores.
If I'm honest, it left me feeling a tiny, tiny bit shaken! This must be what MMO fans feel all the time. Those poor freaks.
As much as I got into it, I don't think I could recommend it, at least not the way I played it. It's just too much of a derivative mess. It's too small, too barebones, too frustratingly slow. As I wrote this review and got further away from its malicious grasp, my opinion fell more than I thought it would.
If you really like clicker games or have a friend group that just wants to run around collecting endless mineral deposits while chatting, it's a good fit, but as an actual game? Nah. It worked its way into my brain and got me hooked, but the journey wasn't worth it.
Should I do a rating? I don't know. 5/10. There you go.