At first glance, "Journey to the Savage Planet" looks a lot like "No Man's Sky," and given that it was created by the new studio of Alex Hutchinson, director of "Assassin's Creed III" and "Far Cry 4" I might as well start by explaining which game it doesn't resemble.

You and your co-op partner will be on a jolly, colorful, distant planet scanning its local life forms for raw materials for crafting, but it's neither nonlinear nor vast like "No Man's Sky." Nor is it "Far Cry In Space," although guns certainly occupy the lower right-hand corner of the screen. What Typhoon Studios has created with its debut film is something else.

It gives you the feeling of being stranded in a huge, unknown, alien environment, but the path through it is carefully designed. That path takes you through platforming sequences, boss fights, mob fights, environmental puzzles, and often requires you to return twice, using new kit in old areas to access previously inaccessible places. The game also regularly makes you laugh along with the storyline, and the heart of the mystery: What is a giant tower in the middle of a planet that is supposed to be devoid of intelligent life doing in the middle of it?

The game is a comedy metroidvania survival shooter platformer, a sort of subnautica among the stars with added bells and whistles. As an employee of Kindred Aerospace, you are sent to the farthest reaches of who-knows-where to investigate the planet and see if there is anything of value for the company, but you are in a bind when your spaceship is damaged during landing. A voyage of discovery is necessary to survive and procure the parts you need to make the journey home.

The heavy lifting required to find aluminum or to feed a small bird an indeterminate nutrient paste to collect carbon-rich feces is a simplistic enough setup. But the text of the JTTSP is truly ridiculous.

Humor is notoriously subjective, and perhaps your own experience with this comedy is like watching a friend's karaoke in the middle of a dental exam, but I disagree: the incendiary sales pitch, like toy commercials and instructional videos from the 1980s Live-action commercials for sci-fi gadgets, mimicking the incendiary sales pitches of 80's toy commercials and instructional videos, interrupt this planetary invasion. Even the operation of the loading bar on your ship's computer fascinated me. Really. Funny loading bars.

I'm not sure why I'm so surprised, because when playing co-op, it's easy to let the Discord conversations drown out the jokes and rush ahead without stopping to appreciate the details. In fact, this game may work better solo. A large part of the game's progression is about understanding the terrain of the area and figuring out how to manipulate the flora and fauna to dig deeper; if two people are lost in different places, a lot of time is spent first figuring out exactly where each is lost and then (or perhaps) finding a critical path. Time is spent; I'm not complaining about the availability of co-op, but rather recommending a more anti-social approach if you and a friend are knee-deep in the difficulties of progression.

Once outside the safety of the crashed ship, the mix of aggressive wildlife, cute fauna, and delightfully bizarre landscapes lures you deeper in, and JTTSP makes clever use of this, as you'll find yourself in the middle of the most interesting and challenging landscape in the world. The first pufferbirds you encounter are at least 50% eyeballs, and it's impossible not to feel attached to their trusty calls. In a purely mechanical sense, they are there to produce carbon when given globes. Grob is a purplish canned paste that, according to the blurb, tastes somewhere between beef, sheep spleen poutine, and cucumber shit water, but that's just for reference.

More pertinently, if you overfeed a puffer bird in your quest for carbon, it will pop out. This may not be a big deal to you, but I can't tell you how guilty I felt when I made this discovery. To make matters worse, the only way to get past the meat vortex (a sort of organic waste dump) was to lure the wide-eyed, innocent pufferbirds into the suction range of the vortex and continue on our way while they were being gutted. You beastly devil, you typhoon studio.

Surrounding vegetation and creatures merely fill the space, and there is a gentle puzzle element to almost everything with a pulse. The bee-like creatures that plague the direction of travel at the foot of the tower can be annihilated in one fell swoop by shooting their hives, and the enemy's amber shields can be corroded by the acidic fruits of the Blight Bomb plant.

There is always a reason to pay attention to your surroundings here, and it is not just to make the game look better. Nevertheless, you're right, it does look great. Remember when indie games were released generations after triple-A? Or like one that showed that it wasn't made by a team of a thousand people who spent millions of dollars on it. The detail of the smallest items and the variety of idle animations of the animals are matched only by the height of the knack for enhancing the gorgeous scenery with a painter's eye for framing from all directions.

Ironically, the more you try to refuel your boat and head home, the more bewitching the current climate becomes. The simple rules of each biome--climbing the cliffs of Mount Guthalfin with a grapple seed, double-jumping between the mushroom pads of the fungi of Sinedo VII, lobbing bright bombs at the Matriarch's lair--become a kind of second nature, rooting you to the place and making you miss the once entirely It turns a landscape that was once alien into something nostalgic and familiar. While not radical in its own right, the blend of established genres and mechanics at the core of Journey to an Undiscovered Planet is still as deftly chosen and blended as a musician's mixtape."