Lovely Planet is a mix between a first-person shooter and a 3D platformer that takes mechanics from each genre to absurd extremes. It is a game about games, but more than that it’s a game about trying to keep up with the frantic acceleration that is ever-present in late capitalism.
The game is divided into worlds which are comprised of twenty or so short levels each. The goal of each level is to make it from the starting position to the end purple flagpole without “failing”. Failure is constant in this game; the various ways to fail include: being hit by a projectile, being hit by a homing projectile (which must be shot down), failing to kill a baddie before reaching the pole, killing a non-baddie character, allowing a huge apple to hit the ground before you shoot it, touching any red blob, and of course falling off a platform. The combination of these “failers” in the design of each level necessitates an absurd commitment to microscopic precision in every player movement. PC Gamer reviewer Tyler Wilde remarks, “There is no damn way it is seriously asking me to hit a damn jump pad, spin around, shoot a damn apple, turn back, shoot the damn blob on the next platform, and nail the next damn jump,” before admitting, “And then, through brute force repetition, I do it.” The only way to succeed is to play the level over and over again until your hands have memorized the exact pattern of muscle twitches that will get you to the purple pole without dying. The game actively encourages endless repetition, immediately restarting you at the beginning upon failure without even a “you failed” text interrupting your mindless quest for perfection. Upon completion of each level, you’re shown how long you took to complete the level (down to .01 seconds) and the global leaderboard of lowest times (which is always cheerfully led by some persistent player who has managed to complete every single level in a negative(!) amount of time).
The world of Lovely Planet does not mirror the obsessive drive to precision and speed that its mechanics cultivate. Visually, it is marked by cutesy graphics: a pastel palette and a low-poly environment create a blocky, colorful, surreal world. Sonically, each level is backed by a different cheerful, up-tempo 8-bit track, underscoring the feeling of frantic acceleration mediated by this cutesy bizarre world.
The genre mashup of FPS and 3D platformer is a useful frame for this game, but is only accurate to a point. There are clear references to Mario, both mechanically and sonically, combined with a first-person shooter point of view, mechanic (shooting). But rather than relying on this union of genres as its basis, LP takes the logic of each mode of play to an absurd extreme. Jumping between platforms/islands must be timed down to the millisecond. And with shooting folded into the same logic (especially with the lack of crosshairs), the player is frequently forced to multitask between jumping or shooting (or fail), never given a moment’s rest by the game. This stands in stark contrast to standard platformers, where the player often stops to solve rudimentary puzzles or is allowed to rest on a moving platform. And even the most hyper-chaotic shooters have some sort of respawn timer. Lovely Planet pushes the pace of play to its physical limit.
What happens if you refuse to play by the game’s rules– refuse to be drawn into this ever-accelerating loop of jumping and shooting? As long as you don’t let any rogue apples hit the ground (resetting the level), your huge jump height makes exploration surprisingly easy. And there’s a lot to explore. When I started poking around levels (ignoring the disapproving timer in the corner of my screen), I found lots of lovely surprises– a slowly spinning record player tucked under a ledge or an open briefcase hidden behind a fence. Off in the distance, one can often see a huge fish or bird wending its way around another island. The designers have created a rich, vibrant world, but use mechanics and speedrunning logic to streamline our experience of that world into one of mindless, oblivious repetition.
To me, this reads as an exploration of the constantly accelerating, efficiency maximizing, dehumanizing system of labor under late capitalism. Right now, even as students, we are forced into a strict schedule wherein every single minute of our time must produce maximum utility for our studies (or our employer). Much like this game forces the player to constantly multitask between running, jumping, shooting, our economic system forces us to constantly run from one thing to the next, cramming more and more work into fewer and fewer hours. I can only imagine what it’s like for the average Amazon warehouse worker. On top of this, Lovely Planet coats the entire game experience in a sugary, inoffensive world, mimicking both the infantilizing marketing and the “work-life balance” gloss present in startup culture. This game is about the absurdity (and pain) of living out this logic, but also about its inescapability. Sure you can go find the cool record player off the edge of the cliff, but then you’ll be stuck at the bottom of a cliff staring at a record player until you press ‘r’ and restart the level.
Note: for a very different story of this game, check out this video of all the hidden areas, which are impossible to reach if you’re actually trying to finish the level.
Love that last paragraph!