There is a particular kind of invitation, rare in a genre that usually hands you a jetpack and a single planet, in waking up redundant on a beach and discovering that the entire product is four worlds that keep inventing new ways to bounce you. The goo is still goo. The whip is still a whip. The first creature that tries to teach you a lesson is not a metaphor. Revenge of the Savage Planet, the third-person satirical action adventure from Raccoon Logic Studios Inc., is built on that dare, and the dare is louder, stickier, and more useful than a thirty-dollar revenge has any right to be.
I played the PlayStation 5 version, the 8 May 2025 launch at $29.99 that Raccoon Logic Studios Inc. walked onto living rooms and Steam after a Cosmic Hoarder weekend that already knew how to spray water. You wake abandoned. You scan plants. You capture creatures. You invent a way home by collecting the company that dumped you. Forty-seven Steam achievements sit in the spray. The English Steam sample is Very Positive, 89 percent of 1,860, with 3,558 voices across languages, which is the honest weather of a finished comedy and not a dare. Great, not weightless, and very much a sky I would recommend you fall into if you like a Metroidvania that remembers it is also a cartoon.
The Beach Does Not Hand You a Finished Planet
Most exploration games begin with a speech about destiny. Revenge of the Savage Planet begins with a pink slip and a beach that has already decided you are inventory. Official copy on Steam says a future knocked off its axis by corporate greed and stupidity, then asks you, with the grammar of a person who has already been fired in orbit, to explore every nook, collect dozens of upgrades, and turn over every mysterious alien rock if you want revenge on your former employer and a ticket home. That is not flavor text. It is the design refusing to pay for a cutscene when a Pioneer Program brochure will do.
You start because Alta Interglobal has already written you out of the org chart, and Kindred Technologies, a wholly owned subsidiary with a sense of humor about that sentence, would like you to keep working anyway. The first stretch is staged like a welcome that forgot to be gentle. A double jump arrives. A weak pistol arrives. A goo gun that only knows water arrives. Nobody holds your wrist if you wander into a cave instead of following the first marker. That is the rest of the map, and the map is four planets that keep using the same joke on purpose.
I like a premise that prices curiosity as a hazard and then lets you walk toward it anyway. Stellaris Prime is a lush argument with a swamp in the middle and a habitat that will grow if you keep showing up with science. Xephyr is a desert that treats shade as a rumor. Quasadron IX invents its own weather. Zenithian Rift splits the difference between a frozen tundra and a volcano that has not read the memo. A fifth world, SLAPPI’s Den of Fun, waits after the credits like a nineties commercial that learned to be a planet. Why the plants glow. What a corporation wants with a catalog. The more you scan, the more the sky answers with another biome and another thing that would like a piece of your stamina.
The fantasy is not mastery of a lore bible. The fantasy is competence arriving about half a day after you invent a whip. You will fail in ways that would be funny if the fall were not so sincere. You bounce. You respawn. You become the kind of person who thinks a scanner pulse is a personality. First person was a window. Third person is a costume. The costume is the point.
Goo, Whip, and a Science Level That Hires You
The loop is the old religion and Raccoon Logic Studios Inc. does not pretend otherwise. Scan the flora. Catalog the fauna. Complete the experiment that raises your science level. Craft the tool that opens the ledge you walked under three hours ago. None of that is a revolution. All of that is the sentence the rest of the toybox has to live in.
Traversal is physical in the way a good cartoon is physical. You are not only drowning in menus. You are looking at a gap and deciding whether you have been useful enough today. The Proton Whip X11 arrives on a quest that has the nerve to call itself a rodeo, then spends the rest of the week as a lasso, a cleaner of blue gunk, and, once you research a Hognork, a tether that will throw you across a canyon if you ask it politely. A later launcher will invent a grapple point when the cliff forgot to pack one. The Hawx Rail Grinder treats energy rails as a commute. A stomp will break the floor you used to apologize for. A later jump will make the first cliff look like furniture. The trailer says the quiet part out loud. Run, jump, shoot, grind, stomp, dodge, slide, whip, and grapple your way through the world.
I have played a lot of games that treat the first gadget as a tutorial and the hundredth as a spreadsheet. Revenge of the Savage Planet is heavier than that on the goo and lighter than that on the sermon. The Goo Ingestor is the other half of the pitch. Water fills slimes and plants until they burst and washes the slick green you did not mean to step in. Green goo makes a floor that would rather be a joke than a sidewalk and will catch fire if you let it. Ferro goo, the purple that conducts, will open an organic door or slow a cousin that wanted to eat you. Lava burns cobwebs and anything that thought it was fireproof. Official copy says three types of gameplay goo. The hose does not mind if you treat that as a menu. The planets mind if you bring the wrong color.
That sentence is both a promise and a warning. If you want a combat loop that never asks you to spray a plant, you will feel underemployed. If you want a week that turns a water pistol into a chemistry set, you will feel hired. I left the greedy path on for an evening and the careful path on for another. The plants did not mind. The creatures minded either way. Puzzles are the hose talking to the landscape. Combat is the hose talking to a crowd. Both conversations use the same vocabulary, which is why a new color feels like a new planet even when you are still standing on the old one. The pistol will get louder later. Until then it is a reminder, not a career. A mid-air slap that bats a projectile back is the shop admitting that a cartoon should be allowed to win an argument with timing. None of those verbs replace the scan. The scan is still the job.
Four Worlds and a Trailer That Keeps Receipts
Pressure is the variety. A ledge you can finally reach is a better reward than a new silhouette if the silhouette is just another way to lose a scan. Hunting secrets is good practice and a grocery run. Caves, lakes, mountains, the usual alien hospitality. Sparks happen. The store page is not shy about it. What the store page cannot tell you is how quickly you will start treating a successful catalog as a mood stabilizer. You eat science. You drink science. You put the whip down and look at the habitat like a person who has decided civilization is a pen.
The habitat on Stellaris Prime is the other half of the short description and the kinder half of a week. Official features ask you to store captured creatures in pens, display the weird rocks in a customizable Space Trailer, and raise a science level that unlocks the next piece of gear. A trailer that can wear your junk like a personality arrives. Mastery, here, is logistics with a sense of humor. You gather, you stash, you return to a previous planet with a new hose and a bad idea about a door you walked past on Tuesday, and you dock like a person who has mail. The map does not get smaller because the developers deleted sky. It gets smaller because you invented commuting.
I will not invent a highlight reel with fake timestamps and tidy capture counts. The nights that stay with you are the ones where you thought the catalog was finished, then something started glowing in a rhythm that was not weather, and then you were on the wrong side of your own stomp. Combat can feel like two cartoons agreeing to take turns being disappointed. A pistol will get manners later. Until then, a whip is a strategy, not a cowardice. Distance helps. The right goo helps more. Ecosystems keep moving when you are not looking, which is the shop refusing to pause the weather for your convenience. A plant will eat a creature you were herding. A creature will invent a problem you were using as a shortcut. The planet is allowed to have a day job.
Creatures can be stunned, lassoed, and researched if none of their cousins land a hit during the handshake. Weak spots exist. Friends exist. The handshake is the joke. Each planet keeps its own building for the collection, which is the shop admitting that a hoarder should have more than one closet. Color palettes unlock. Outfits unlock. Forty-seven achievements sit behind names like Zoologist, Cannonball, Homemaker, and Alta Cares, the shop admitting it has a sense of humor and is not ashamed of it. None of them change the central truth. You are here to get fired properly and then find out what the firing was for.
Official copy winks that there may be more than four planets. Maybe. The wink is the design. The maybe is a shrine and a door you will not see until the credits have already tried to send you home.
A Couch, a Lasso, and the Joke That Walks
Co-op is the temperature change. Official copy asks you to play with your best friend, partner, or hellspawn on or between any platform, then remembers the older joy of sitting on the same couch and sharing a screen. That sentence is the closest Revenge of the Savage Planet comes to a power fantasy, and I like it more than a new gun. Someone sprays. Someone grapples. Someone learns, too late, that a captured cousin does not respect architecture. The planet becomes a shared instrument you play with a person instead of a commute.
I have a rule for mid-priced satire. If a game is worse with a friend than with a checklist, it is broken. If it is only good with a friend, it is honest. Revenge of the Savage Planet is honest in both directions, and that honesty should sit next to the price. A solo night is a competent weekend. You scan the plant, you invent the hose, you lose a fight, you come back dressed. A couch night is the version the systems were quietly designed around. The lasso becomes a conversation. The goo becomes a dare. The joke walks instead of waiting in a text box. Cross-play means the friend does not have to own the same shelf. Split-screen means the friend does not have to own another room.
The humor is the other unfinished argument. Alta Interglobal talks like a company that has already lost the argument with a human resources department and decided to win on volume. Kindred talks like a catalog that would like you to keep buying the thing that fired you. SLAPPI talks like a nineties mascot that learned every slogan twice. Some of that is funny. Some of that is a drone that will not sit down. I will not pretend every line earned the airtime. I will say the worlds are funnier than the speeches, which is the right instinct for a game that wants your hands more than your diary and then, in the interface, forgets.
Story is environmental and stingy in the wild, talkative and brochure-heavy at the habitat, which is the shop refusing to pay for a novel when a loading screen will do. You are not reading a manifesto. You are looting a layoff that is still happening. Logs and signs do the work a cutscene would have charged more for. Late chapters will turn the satire toward a door I will not spoil. The walk there is the product.
Color That Talks Louder Than the Satire
Presentation is the identity and the argument. Third person, after a first-person predecessor that already knew how to be cute, puts the explorer in the frame so the run can be a joke. Official copy calls it upbeat, satirical, joyous. The palette does the work. You can tell Stellaris Prime from Xephyr from a rift at a glance. If you cannot read a biome, the hunt dies and the trailer becomes homework. These spaces are atmospheric enough to carry a scare and clear enough to carry a plan. You always know where you are. You do not always know why a plant is already there.
Sound is the other half of the hospitality. Creatures coo. Goo lands like a punchline. A whip crack does the job of weather. I left the volume where a comedy usually loses me, and the planets did not, until a mascot opened its throat. English is the Steam language with full audio in French and a long list of interface cousins, which is how a wider audience gets in the door. Full controller support is on the sheet. I will not turn this into a localization seminar. The voice of the game is the catalog, and the catalog talks in scans, rails, and the occasional corporate knock.
A Gate That Talks and Weather That Shrugs
I should be clear about the friction, because it is real and it is not a footnote you hide after the score. Revenge of the Savage Planet looks like a game that was built by a shop that wanted an adventure more than a showcase, then discovered the adventure was four planets and a fifth that wanted to be television. Early hours can feel like a commute before the toolset shows its real hand. Upgrade gates will test a person who wanted a postcard. Combat can stay a bounce. Backtracking through a habitat that would like another science deposit can sulk. Performance can shrug when a dense fog decides to remember it is a theology problem. I will not invent a frame census. I will say the sky sometimes forgets to stock the smoothness you need and then shrugs like weather.
None of that is unique to this revenge. All of that is the tax on a mid-priced Metroidvania that launched in May 2025 and was still being tended, with quality-of-life passes and a later brawl, into the winter. A joke can repeat itself like a loading screen that learned to talk. If you want a polished novel, you should look elsewhere. If you want a place that is already a place, you are the audience.
Still Standing After the Goo Dries
Revenge of the Savage Planet is a rare mid-priced adventure that understands its own joke and then has the nerve to make the joke a planet. Raccoon Logic Studios Inc. built a sky about revenge, a hose about teamwork you do with a color, and a toybox that looks a little homemade and plays a lot more sincerely than that sentence suggests. The loop is the hook. The gadgets are the spine. The walk from a beach to a company that has to pay is the grin.
It is better with a friend than with a checklist. The late rooms can clunk in the way a padded science gate is clunky. The jokes can talk past the landing. Performance can sulk. The presentation has indie fingerprints, from the stubborn animations to the story that would rather be a brochure than a cutscene. All of that is true, and all of that is already priced in at $29.99 on a launch that arrived in May 2025 and kept getting rooms. You are not buying a decade. You are buying a season that can turn into several evenings if you like being a coordinated disaster, or being the person who has to explain the disaster to a pen.
I am scoring it 8.5, Great, because the identity is this clear and the limitations are the limitations of a focused comedy, not an empty one. I would recommend it to anyone who likes a workbench that has weight and a map that is allowed to be rude. Distinctive planet weather, a hose that shrinks the horizon, a capture that turns research into conversation, and a price that respects a long week are a lot of game for the ask. The systems repeat their manners. The manners are still useful.
The sky is still out there, still hiring a night shift, still asking what Earth was. After a few planets you will understand why the job is not finished, and why you keep waking up on the beach anyway.
We prepared this review with a digital copy of Revenge of the Savage Planet for the PS5 version provided by Pressengine.
