Lifeless Planet is essentially a “walking simulator” with platforming and light puzzles. You play as an astronaut, who lands on a planet which was thought to be rich with life. Instead it seems devoid of life aside from a few plants and a mysterious humanoid. There’s evidence that it was populated by Russians years ago.
You mainly piece together the story via audio-logs you find across the levels. There’s some narration (but then a lot of it is in Russian anyway), so there’s a lot of reading. There’s some sections where you seem to be hallucinating. I think some of these sections were trying to draw similarities to the astronaut's wife to provide a motivation for his obsession with following the humanoid.
There is a decent amount of variety in the environment so; flat lands, canyons, facilities, volcanic etc. There’s definitely some large bland areas that are simply a slog to get through and feel like unnecessary padding. When you reach the end of the area/chapter, you are placed in the next one. Some of these felt a bit disjointed.
I don’t think it works well as a platforming game since the controls aren’t tight enough and the terrain isn’t designed for smooth platforming. Since the terrain is so uneven it makes the platforming really difficult. You often slip off the platform, miss your landing, fall down a gradient which then prevents your initial jump. At least there is a fairly satisfying ragdoll as you plummet to your death. Even walking can be difficult. In some sections I was walking down a gradient and it suddenly decreased; but now the fall height is enough to kill.
Sometimes I found it was not very obvious where to go. For most of the game you are following a green trail that the humanoid alien leaves behind as she walks. You are told it seems to be a reaction to the surface, so some surfaces don’t have any markings. This seemed a bit inconsistent because I was convinced I was seeing surfaces which should be marked - but weren’t.
Sometimes you see an interesting landmark on the horizon, or a little flash in the distance, but often you are looking for subtle paths. In general, I think it suffers from poor game design.
Another problem is that if you respawn, often I was placed at a checkpoint but facing the wrong direction. It often took me a while to recognise where I had been placed.
The mechanics are introduced over the first few chapters. You can double jump (small Jetpac boost), enable flashlight, push rocks, and a robotic arm to grab and place objects. There’s an extended boost which allows several Jetpac boosts, but this is only enabled in sections where it is required, then conveniently you run out of fuel.
Occasionally you are told you are running low on oxygen, but there will be a crashed shuttle nearby that replenishes it. I didn’t really see the point of this inclusion. It was simply a story trigger rather than running out using the game time, but yet it didn’t add anything to the story.
Some of the puzzles are simply “push block here”, or “locate item”. There’s a few slightly more complex block pushing puzzles, and I think the door puzzles were trial and error (if there was more nuance than that, then I didn’t understand).
Since it is an Indie game, I don’t expect the graphics to be that good, and these are fine. I think the textures are acceptable but some objects seem like the texture isn’t scaled correctly so look stretched. The main problem I had with the graphics is that there seemed to be a blurred effect around the edge that made it hard to look at. I definitely couldn’t play the game for more than an hour each session which I was convinced was due to the blurring. Really, you probably could knock it up in Unity with the terrain generation and free texture pack.
Overall, I’d say it’s not a complete disaster but was quite frustrating to play. The graphics are functional, but not good enough to enjoy the bland walking parts on its own. It definitely doesn’t work as a platforming game. The story was decent enough but not compelling enough to recommend it for a pure story-based experience.