A solid adventure game throwback with enough style to keep us engaged
I’m a huge fan of classic point-and-click adventures. I grew up with a Tandy PC in the Eighties, so these kinds of games were some of the only ones that would work well on the platform. They mixed beautiful visuals, cool characters, cool worlds and great stories, and opened me up to games being more than just arcade shooters — I can create a direct line from Sierra to my love of RPGs today.
I can also make a direct line to Dexter Team’s The Abandoned Planet, although this would be much more literal because it’s essentially a 1989 point & click adventure game made in 2024. And I’m totally okay with that.
The Abandoned Planet feels completely familiar to anyone who played those experiences; it’s not trying to reinvent the wheel, it’s just trying to remind us that the wheel existed. It takes the visual styles and interaction of the era and translates it into a first person screen-by-screen experience, as if Myst and Space Quest had a baby. It has an underlying lightheartedness that prevents the game from becoming too serious, and understands that we need to enjoy (or at least, not be annoyed by) every puzzle. And it’s short, clocking in around two hours which is perfect for an adventure game like this where we need to click around on every room or area we come across until we find something useful.
Set on a mysterious planet, we take control of a character who’s just crashed down and needs to find her way around and back on her way home. It has hints of classic Star Trek, emphasized with a scanning tool that we get early on. Each area we come across introduces us to new gameplay mechanics, so we may begin by clicking and collecting but eventually need to learn to rotate items or navigate some lite momentum-based action sequences. It’s not difficult, none of it is and it’s not meant to be, so we don’t ever get frustrated. The developer really wants us to keep moving forward, and we do.
The puzzle design revolves most around seeing a rope, grabbing a rope, and using that rope later in an area that very clearly wants us to use a rope. Or an axe. Or a gem. It’s all telegraphed directly into our faces so that we know what to look for in case we don’t have a specific item to solve a puzzle. Sometimes the telegraphing goes too far, because this game is chatty. CHAAAAAATTY. The voice acting is great, but there sure is a lot of it. Our lead likes to provide context on everything we click on; it’s okay the first time, but once we start hearing the same phrase over and over again we tend to turn down the volume on our SteamDeck pretty quickly.
And that’s really it. It’s a short game, which I appreciated as something I could take on while binging a few episodes of a Netflix show with the family, one eye on the screen and one eye on the alien that I’ve just come across in the game. The Abandoned Planet is available on PC and mobile, and works really well on a SteamDeck (we played with the sticks) and on PC with a mouse.
This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher/PR. It first appeared on The SideQuest for September 27, 2024. Images and video courtesy publisher.
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