The Abandoned Planet review - desolate delights

Wormhole. Crash landing. Stranded. It may sound familiar, but it’s what you do with a setting that counts, and The Abandoned Planet is one worth braving the wormhole for.

It may share a developer with 2022’s Dexter Stardust, but the two games are remarkably different. ‘Zany’ might be the best way to describe Dexter’s episodic adventure, but ‘lonely’ is definitely the word for our astronaut's journey. She doesn't even get a name - there’s nobody around to exchange names or share a cuppa with, after all.

That’s not to say the Saturday-morning-cartoon vibes are absent, however. Our protagonist generally sounds upbeat, uses ‘space’ as a curse word, and doesn’t tend to dwell on the insurmountable odds - or occasional skeleton that failed to overcome them. It may not shock you to learn that a character with no name doesn’t get much backstory or personality, but it feels like a sorely missed opportunity that we don’t learn much of anything about the face stuck in the corner of the screen throughout the story’s five acts.

The clue’s in the name, though, and The Abandoned Planet is a joy to explore. It may not be the first point-and-click game to use a first-person perspective, but it’s used wonderfully to make every ladder you climb, console you touch, and door you open feel like a personal achievement in a way that a typical third-person adventure can’t match.

The story we do get is almost entirely communicated through its environments, using liminal spaces and a general eerie quiet to make your mind wander. Where did this planet’s inhabitants go? Why did they leave so much behind? Am I really alone here, and whatever the answer to that question is, why?

Mild puzzle spoilers ahead!

The game does more-or-less answer those questions, and the movie-like script you get for reaching the end will break the plot down in simple terms - but the puzzles are where the game really shines. Across the five acts, your typical combine-items-in-right-place puzzles are joined by mazes, 3D block rotations, and plenty others to keep things fresh. There can be a bit too much hand-holding (inspecting inventory items for a nudge in the right direction can sometimes feel more like being shoved with both hands), but the game really picks up after the first act when you're left to your own devices.

A design decision you’ll love or hate, many puzzles are a test of memory. Remember the ways a four-armed statue’s limbs were aligned, repeat the order that you saw lights appear, and in one slightly-too-long-for-its-own-good sequence of puzzles in act 3, translate several sequences of alien numbers and remember where they’re supposed to be used. The tried-and-true ‘journal full of contextless drawings that just so happen to be puzzle solutions’ provides many ‘a-ha!’ moments throughout the game, but I would’ve loved the option to manually fill a few blank pages with my discoveries - or get some indication that I should be taking notes before having to backtrack through unskippable cutscenes (or the agonisingly slow rafting section) over and over.

Despite including a rather helpful map, It’s a real shame that the game doesn’t include a fast travel system, as the slow backtracking and multiple elevator rides dampen the game’s latter half a bit. While there are some inconsistencies in difficulty - some puzzles could be brute forced, some journal drawings were a bit too abstract, and some mechanics felt overlooked (I was stumped by a telescope that gave no indication that you could look around with it), but have to give credit where it’s due - it all felt worthwhile when I had memorised the aliens’ symbols for numbers 1-7 and could start seeing the planet like they did as a result.

While I usually bang an old drum in these reviews about how the game I'm covering should have more accessibility options, The Abandoned Planet actually gets a big thumbs-up in this regard. You can press and hold a button to see interactable elements, navigate with the mouse, WASD, or arrow keys, and even replay specific acts regardless of where you saved. More manual save slots would’ve been nice, but the autosave system makes manual saving an afterthought - and New Game Plus challenging you to beat the game in two hours or die trying says it all.

Like Dexter Stardust’s, the ending is a cliffhanger for games yet-to-come, but if there was ever a game where the journey was more important than the destination, it’d be this one. A platformer and two other unannounced projects set in the same universe are on the way, and while that may put off the hardcore point-and-click-only crowd, I for one, am excited - the SteamWorld series is a personal favourite for its ability to constantly reinvent itself, and after seeing what Dexter Team Games can do in the point-and-click genre alone, the future certainly seems bright.

In the here-and-now, though, an excellent and eerie journey through an empty world awaits on The Abandoned Planet.

Reviewed on PC. A review code was provided by the publisher.