Planet Of Lana 2 review – the prettiest landscapes in gaming

One of the most beautiful indie games of recent years gets a sequel that’s even more stunning to look at, as it tries to follow in the footsteps of Inside and Limbo.

Considering the state of the world, it’s odd how many games choose to focus on freshly synthesised horror. Even puzzle games do it. Classics like Limbo and Inside, both of which used a deliberately dark aesthetic, their protagonists mere shadows against a desolate backdrop, have been joined more recently by the Little Nightmares franchise and Reanimal, all building worlds you would never want to visit in real life.

They also feature children as their main characters, whose small size and vulnerability lends additional poignancy to the grotesque dangers they encounter. It wasn’t always like this. In the early days of video games a great many titles framed their gameplay with brightly optimistic ‘Sega blue skies’ and a cheerful primary colour palette. Perhaps today’s lurch into squalid ruination is a reaction against all that, but games like Planet Of Lana remind you that there is another way.

Released three years ago, it was a charming if mildly insipid puzzle game set in pastoral, 2D scrolling landscapes. It also had child protagonists and, like ICO before it, gave them an invented language you couldn’t understand, and then didn’t provide subtitles, letting you weave your own meaning out of its characters’ situations and tone of voice. While very little lives up to Sony’s early masterpiece, Planet Of Lana certainly delivered in terms of atmosphere.

This sequel is in almost every respect the equal of the original. There’s much to like about that, from its beautiful, painterly landscapes with towering cloud formations in the background, to its multiple layers of parallax scrolling that bring its lush green forests to life. Ethereal music and judiciously light sound effects infuse its world with bird song and deep, gloopy sub-aquatic sound effects when you’re underwater.

The set design and animation is similarly delightful, from the motion capture of its young hero, to the way your pet, Mui, moves and interacts with the world. Mui is fundamentally cat-like, in that it purrs when you pet it, has pointed ears, and hates water, but distinctly un-cat-like in that it responds accurately and consistently to your commands. For some reason it can also now release an electromagnetic pulse, juicing nearby doors or machinery with electricity.

To add to the sense of being an organic Swiss Army knife, you later discover Mui can suppress the radiation that comes from chunks of waste product, mined by the game’s new baddies. In the original your village’s bucolic idyll was interrupted by robotic alien invaders. By the end you’d already seen them off, their spidery metal carcasses used for riding, farming or housing.

Unfortunately, fellow humans are now harnessing the extraterrestrial technology to mine polluting poisons from the Earth, and when a little girl falls ill because of it, you set off looking for the ingredients for a cure, which naturally reside in four contrasting biomes. To find them you’ll need to solve the game’s undemanding 2D puzzles, quite a number of which are recycled from the previous game.

The first Planet Of Lana was criticised for its simplicity, with puzzles that never quite felt taxing enough, even though some took a while to work your way through because of fiddly controls. That was partly thanks to a perceptible lag between control inputs and your character’s motion, a bit like the original 1980s Prince Of Persia, whose pre-canned rotoscoped animation meant every action he undertook had to complete before he could do anything else.

Planet Of Lana 2’s hero is similarly afflicted. The game also shares a tendency to repeat puzzle mechanics without layering them or adding complexity. For example, in one of its underwater sections featuring an elegantly designed mini-submarine, you need to nudge open a heavy metal door by barging into it. That exact same interaction is needed four more times in the ensuing minutes, none of which adds a twist, disguises itself, or does anything differently.

There are other parts of the game that play almost like a 2D walking simulator, leaving you to gambol through the gloriously realised landscapes without the need to stop, think, or fool around with the controls. The problem is that when even the puzzles don’t detain you for long, everything can start to feel a little too insubstantial, your enjoyment marred not by distractions, but by the lack of them.

Unlike films, games often improve radically in their sequels. That’s to be expected in a more nascent medium, and one underpinned by the steady march of technology, but it’s also more noticeable when it’s absent. If you loved Planet Of Lana, its follow up offers precisely the same mix of hand-drawn charm and lacklustre puzzle design. But it’s a great shame that it doesn’t offer anything at all new or different.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC
Price: £16.99
Publisher: Thunderful
Developer: Wishfully
Release Date: 5th March 2026
Age Rating: 12

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