Well, here we are. From one extremely short title to yet another extremely short title, we find ourselves with a game that is actually ten minutes shorter than 198X, and wouldn’t you know it, I enjoy it far more than that other game? Now why is that? Could it be that, despite the smaller budget and less resources, it could create a vastly more interesting story and world? The answer is yes. So let’s talk about Planet RIX-13
The game starts with a nameless, faceless astronaut as he crash lands on a strange planet. Apparently, there were people on the planet, but they are all gone now. You have two options. You can find out what happened to the people on the planet and why they were here in the first place, or you can just leave. What you do from the start of the game is all up to you. I can always admire a game that doesn’t feed you a hundred different things at once and just jumps into the gameplay. Context is good, but come on, I got other indie games to play. And let me tell you, the art style is pretty good. Sure, it’s no Blasphemous or anything, but it still has a lot of charm to it. Even if you can have your character floating on the ground like a ghost if you just tap the analog stick, which is pretty funny. What you will mostly be doing is trying to solve puzzles to unlock one area and continue to another. The puzzle will rarely be solved in the same area, so you gotta explore and find a way to get through it, usually by going to new locations and picking up clues from there. It’s easy, but it does offer a lot of exploration and mood setting. There’s also not a lot of music in the game, or even any ambience on the alien planet. The only sound is your footsteps on the grass or in the metal plated floors of the labs. It could be considered boring, but I think it adds to the lonely, creepy atmosphere of the planet. And that creepy atmosphere pays off when you eventually start finding corpses around the lab and blood. And that’s when the game really starts to pick up.
Again, you can just leave the planet once you have all the parts you need, but if you want, you can choose to explore, unlock more areas, solve more puzzles, and find out what caused the lab assistants to die and go crazy. The game does have a lot of backtracking and it does make me wish you could run faster rather than have your character slowly walk, but at least he isn’t running out of breath every two seconds like in Uncanny Valley. When you do find more clues lying around, ones pointing to something far greater than anything man made, the game starts to change the effects of your surroundings. Is it a sanity effect or perhaps the world shifting. I don’t know. Everything in Planet RIX-13 is up to interpretation and I do enjoy that. And at the end of it all, I won’t spoil what happens, but it does create an interesting look into one of my favorite styles of horror. Uh, do note that the effects of picking up clues can have some issues. It did mess up on my screen and it hurt to look at after a while, but after resetting the game, it worked again. The game autosaves frequently so you won’t have to worry about losing a ton of progress.
Planet RIX-13 was a game I thought I would have very little to talk about, but I walked away with quite a few thoughts about it. It’s far from the most revolutionary indie game out there and it can be considered a walking simulator, but it does just enough to interest me, and it is sold for pretty cheap. It’s like a dollar ninety nine and I got it for even cheaper on a sale, so maybe look into this game if you want something that doesn’t hold your hand and let’s you think of the story more rather than tell you.
Up next: Make way for the bad guy.
The game starts with a nameless, faceless astronaut as he crash lands on a strange planet. Apparently, there were people on the planet, but they are all gone now. You have two options. You can find out what happened to the people on the planet and why they were here in the first place, or you can just leave. What you do from the start of the game is all up to you. I can always admire a game that doesn’t feed you a hundred different things at once and just jumps into the gameplay. Context is good, but come on, I got other indie games to play. And let me tell you, the art style is pretty good. Sure, it’s no Blasphemous or anything, but it still has a lot of charm to it. Even if you can have your character floating on the ground like a ghost if you just tap the analog stick, which is pretty funny. What you will mostly be doing is trying to solve puzzles to unlock one area and continue to another. The puzzle will rarely be solved in the same area, so you gotta explore and find a way to get through it, usually by going to new locations and picking up clues from there. It’s easy, but it does offer a lot of exploration and mood setting. There’s also not a lot of music in the game, or even any ambience on the alien planet. The only sound is your footsteps on the grass or in the metal plated floors of the labs. It could be considered boring, but I think it adds to the lonely, creepy atmosphere of the planet. And that creepy atmosphere pays off when you eventually start finding corpses around the lab and blood. And that’s when the game really starts to pick up.
Again, you can just leave the planet once you have all the parts you need, but if you want, you can choose to explore, unlock more areas, solve more puzzles, and find out what caused the lab assistants to die and go crazy. The game does have a lot of backtracking and it does make me wish you could run faster rather than have your character slowly walk, but at least he isn’t running out of breath every two seconds like in Uncanny Valley. When you do find more clues lying around, ones pointing to something far greater than anything man made, the game starts to change the effects of your surroundings. Is it a sanity effect or perhaps the world shifting. I don’t know. Everything in Planet RIX-13 is up to interpretation and I do enjoy that. And at the end of it all, I won’t spoil what happens, but it does create an interesting look into one of my favorite styles of horror. Uh, do note that the effects of picking up clues can have some issues. It did mess up on my screen and it hurt to look at after a while, but after resetting the game, it worked again. The game autosaves frequently so you won’t have to worry about losing a ton of progress.
Planet RIX-13 was a game I thought I would have very little to talk about, but I walked away with quite a few thoughts about it. It’s far from the most revolutionary indie game out there and it can be considered a walking simulator, but it does just enough to interest me, and it is sold for pretty cheap. It’s like a dollar ninety nine and I got it for even cheaper on a sale, so maybe look into this game if you want something that doesn’t hold your hand and let’s you think of the story more rather than tell you.
Up next: Make way for the bad guy.
