Revenge of the Savage Planet is a bright, colourful sci-fi adventure where you’ll travel across various planets, meeting aliens, solving neat environmental puzzles, and unlocking cool gear. It’s also a game where you’ll spend significant time kicking and exploding cute creatures, to horrifying results. I learned a lot about myself while playing this game, and none of it was very good, I think.
It was in staring down at a pile of goo adorned by rolling, disembodied raccoon-like eyes that I had to stop and think about the monster I was becoming, and why I still craved more destruction as I continued on, putting my best kicking foot forward.
Revenge of the Savage Planet prioritises easy, breezy fun in its design, and it’s why I found myself in such a morally dubious position in the first place. There’s little friction in the game’s systems. You might be a pawn in a corporate system, tasked with gentrifying outer space to capitalist ends. But armed with your cool space suit and laser gun, and ever-unfolding little quests, there’s so much glee in taking over and transforming the planets you visit.
Traversal is a particular joy, with each character in Revenge having a jaunty walk cycle, and the ability to bounce and slide across planet surfaces. As you travel, you’ll also unlock new ways to leap around, with a whip that can push/pull, and higher jumps that get you further.
It’s in these touches that Revenge of the Savage Planet plays out its light, slapstick humour. It’s hard to take anything seriously when you’re walking around with such confidence and pep in your step. It gives the sense that there’s not a care in the world, and that means you can roam around doing anything, with few consequences. Even death itself isn’t too brutal, with this leading to a simple reload, and a new quest to go collect your gear.
In Revenge, you can tackle anything, without fear of reprisal. If your computer companion tells you there’s resources to be found in the carcasses of Raccocco – small raccoon creatures with bug eyes – you’ll explode them with a gun, without a second thought. And when their eyeballs turn to look at you in awe, you’ll only feel the briefest sense of guilt. And really, only because the developers at Racoon Logic have made all the game’s creatures so very adorable.
Eventually, you will unlock the ability to capture these creatures and enter them for research, so at the very least, you may atone for your sins by providing some of them a cosy habitat. Some. Not the ones you turned into goo, of course. They’re squished now. Just like your sense of right and wrong.
But Revenge of the Savage Planet doesn’t care. With a wink and laugh, you’ll turn your focus to your next steps – even if that means plowing over another tiny bug, in a hail of guts. By the third or fourth time you catch a little being underfoot as you run, their cries don’t mean as much.
Read: Revenge of the Savage Planet was born of resilience – Interview
It’s all in preparation for the rest of Revenge‘s challenges, which include several environmental puzzles involving bug sacrifice, by various means. To open one of the very first areas on Stellaris Prime, you’ll need to pick up adorable baby worms, and feed them to an evil tree.
As EKO states, they’re just little guys. They’re so cute! But they’re also very juicy, and the tree needs da juice. So, into the mouth it goes. It’s all in service of reaching the next area, journey further and faster through alien trees, mushrooms, and fields.
And there really is so much to see. Revenge of the Savage Planet is all about the magic of the otherworld, as each new area introduces vibrant new plants to scan, puzzles to solve, and creatures to explode. Again, all in the name of a good cause. That cause being capitalism.
If you want new weapons and a new suit, you better throw that worm.
The creature destruction isn’t the sole appeal here, but it’s certainly representative of what Revenge goes for – that silly, shocking humour that keeps it feeling bright and bouncy at every turn. While a lack of high stakes does mean you can throw yourself forward without care or consideration, it does make for a light-hearted journey with an absolutely jazzy sense of fun.
Revenge of the Savage Planet launches on 8 May 2025.
A PC code for Revenge of the Savage Planet was provided and played on a Steam Deck for the purposes of these impressions.
