An alien planet, a one-way ticket and a shuttle-load of questions that you must find the answers to welcome to Lifeless Planet for the PC, where nothing is quite what it seems.
At the games core is a story about a man on a mission into the unknown. No, not the in-game hero of this intriguing sci-fi experience but the game's creator David Board, a first-time designer who managed to put this epic title together all on his lonesome. And when you first clap eyes on the game world, you realise that against all the odds, hes managed to pull it off.
You play an astronaut who has taken a one-way trip to a distant planet only to arrive and find that the supposed utopia that scientists glimpsed from Earth is actually a barren wasteland. Not good. But then you stumble across a deserted Russian town and the real questions begin.
And its the search for answers that drives this third-person platformer. Sure, as you traverse 20 epic (and we mean epic) locales, youll be making jetpack-powered leaps between towering rocky outcrops, using your suits robotic arm to move boulders and solving simple puzzles to progress but youll keep coming back to the mystery that lies at the heart of Lifeless Planet.
How on earth did the Russians get here? Is it all a bizarre hoax? Who is the woman you meet whose footprints glow green wherever she goes? And what really motivated our hero to take a no-return trip to the butt-end of space?
And thanks to the games storytelling, its a rich narrative that delivers on its promise over the course of the adventures short running time. Lets be blunt though if youre expecting a finely-honed action adventure with high-octane thrills and Mario-like platforming action, you really should look elsewhere. But if you have a hunger to be sucked into a world that feels both alien and eerily familiar, then Lifeless Planet is a genuinely unique experience. And we dont get to say that often enough about games.