Revenge of the Savage Planet Promises Entertainingly Petty Yet Positive Payback
After taking Restart through a hands-off preview, art director Erick Bilodeau and executive producer Reid Schneider explained how Revenge of the Savage Planet is about getting even, and getting even funnier.
Posted 3 months ago
Sometimes revenge is best served with a butt-faced alien baboon. And by sometimes, we mean in the very specific case of Revenge of the Savage Planet, Raccoon Logic’s recently announced planet-hopping, third-person, action-exploration adventure.
Revenge of the Savage Planet puts you in the airtight boots of an astronaut shipped off in cryostasis for 100 years. Your goal? To establish colonies on distant planets at the behest of your new and generous company. There’s just one problem: Immediately upon arrival you discover that said company, the gigantic megacorp Alta Interglobal, has decided the investment isn’t worth the risk. You’re redundant. Left to fend for yourself on an alien and, yes, occasionally savage planet.
Revenge of the Savage Planet promises four planets to explore.
©Raccoon Logic
In a (presumably) coincidental occurrence, the bulk of developer Raccoon Logic’s staff previously worked at Typhoon Studios, developer of 2020 precursor, Journey to the Savage Planet. Before the game had even launched, the studio was purchased by Google, brought into the fold of the tech giant’s now defunct video game streaming platform Stadia. They didn’t last two years. As Stadia faltered in 2021, Google shut down its internal teams, rendering the entirety of Typhoon Studios redundant.
Journey to the Savage Planet
Release Date: January 28, 2020
Revenge of the Raccoon
But where Stadia stumbled, Raccoon Logic rose. And at Gamescom 2024, the team was ready to unveil their vibrant sequel. After being shown a hands-off demo and introduced to a breadth of new systems in Revenge of the Savage Planet, we had the chance to chat with art director Erick Bilodeau and executive producer Reid Schneider about player freedom, local multiplayer, their favorite new creatures, and, more importantly, why it’s Revenge of the Savage Planet?
“I’ll try and be politically correct,” Schneider says, after a pause to consider his phrasing. “Our creative director, Alex Hutchinson, he had a lot of ideas, experiences, and feelings from our previous life as an acquired company. I think this was a method for him of self expression. Hopefully when you ultimately play it you’ll find it funny and satirical, and you may pick up some of the jokes.”
The shift to a third-person perspective has allowed the team to play with animations.
©Raccoon Logic
So yes, Revenge of the Savage Planet pokes fun at the team’s tribulations and former overlords. But what’s impressive is that, despite the stress and grave pressure those events surely brought, it appears to be doing so in an overtly positive light. Revenge of the Savage Planet explodes with color. Quite literally in the case of some of its alien critters.
The team, too, is buzzing with energy as we speak – a particularly impressive feat during an exhausting, multi-day conference. It’s clear that they’re eager to showcase all the new ideas they’ve been able to introduce with a second entry in the series. The most immediate of them? A shift to the third-person perspective.
“While developing the first game, we realized that platforming was a thing and humor was one of the big pillars of the game,” Bilodeau says. “We thought ah, it would be great if it was in third person, because we could use the character as a canvas with more humorous things happening to [them.] Funny animations, funny reactions. There’s only so much you can do in first person with two hands. So we already had it in our minds in the first game as something that we wanted to push to.”
“When you see your character animate on screen, there’s so much more life that’s possible,” Schneider adds. “In the first game we really had to rely on the creatures to show humor. But in this game we can rely on the creatures and your avatar.”
Revenge of the Savage Planet’s characters saunter through environments with the exaggerated swagger of a classic cartoon. Arms zip forward and backwards when walking, and heads tilt backwards as if struggling to keep up during a sprint. The original game’s slap – a core and amusing method of interactivity with the world – has been stepped up to an almighty kick. Leaning forward, Revenge’s spacefarers lift a leg backwards with enough flexibility to make a ballerina blush before punting anything in front of them into the sky. It’s impossible to keep a grin from your face the first time you see it.
Fauna built for fun
Savage planets: a lot more fun to explore than you might think.
©Raccoon Logic
The same love seems to have been lavished on the various creatures that inhabit the four explorable worlds. In our demo, the Raccoon team took us through a lush jungle, frozen peaks, and a lava cavern – intentionally video-gamey environments – to show off the alien inhabitants of each. Most are comically bouncy, but almost all have been designed to interact with elements in the environment or the player’s toolkit.
That exploding creature we mentioned? Shooting its slime-like body will only cause it to split in two, but douse it in water and it’ll burst, coating the ground. Handy for extending satisfying knee slides, but also highly flammable. Pair that with nearby flowers that spit incendiary globules, and you’ve got a tinderbox for chaotic entertainment.
“There are two [creatures] I really like at the moment,” says Bilodeau. “There’s the little mushroom guy at the beginning, the Raynar. I love him, he’s funny. And another one that you didn’t see which is the babutt. That’s that guy there [Bilodeau points to a large, ape-like creature on the game’s poster with a suspiciously butt-shaped face.] It’s a monkey with… [He pauses.]”
“… An ass for a face,” finishes Schneider as they both chuckle. “We’ll go there.”
“We even put physics on it so it has a jiggly face,” continues Bilodeau. “It would have never passed in a Triple-A studio.”
Erick Bilodeau points out the babutt on Revenge of the Savage Planet's poster.
©Restart
Best of all, the babutt may even become your personal pal. Creature collection is a key mechanic in Revenge of the Savage Planet. Toss out a special device and you can capture aliens like an interstellar Ash Ketchum. Only here, they’re warped back to a farm in your home base. Fans of Journey to the Savage Planet’s rotund and extremely slappable pufferbirds can also take heart. Despite the shift to several new planets, the blob-shaped critters return, and they come in new, highly kickable styles.
“We tried to have variations on the pufferbirds for all the maps,” Schneider says. “Personally, I just love the raccoon puffer. It’s just really cute. The eyes are ginormous, it’s just fun. One of the things we want is creatures that aren’t always gonna attack you – friendly creatures. And having that balance of creatures that are predatory vs friendly is really fun.”
Another aspect getting prime attention in Revenge of the Savage Planet is cooperative play. It was already possible to pair up online in Journey, but Savage will introduce local co-op as well. It might seem a small feature, but it was one Raccoon Logic considered vital for the sequel.
“Co-op has always been important to us,” Schneider says. “The goal with this one was, if you have one friend with a console or a PC, you can play with him or her. So really the goal is to enable people to enjoy that co-op experience any way they want, and on their terms.”
“That was one of the pillars,” Bilodeau agrees. “You and your best buddy against the world. We wanted it to have that aspect.”
We’ll do it live
Anyone who played the first game is bound to remember the unhinged live-action adverts. As Revenge of the Savage Planet’s reveal trailer makes clear, they’re back. Even more numerous, and just as strange as before. These distorted corporate comedies are an element that the Raccoon team clearly loves, but not one they expected to prove quite so popular.
“The only reason we did them on the first game is because we didn’t have money to do CG, and we realized that live-action is cheaper!” Schneider laughs. “And then it became a calling card of the game. Obviously ads are back, and there’s a lot of really funny story content that’s highly satirical in there.”
Our first look at Revenge of the Savage Planet was all too brief, but it’s already apparent just how proud the team is of what they’ve achieved, and how pleased they are to even have the chance to return to the series. That positivity, they hope, will be readily apparent to anyone who climbs out of the game’s opening cryo pods.
“We wanna make this a big offering,” Schneider says. “We’re obviously still an indie company, but our goal is to make something really cool for players.”
“Yeah,” Bilodeau agrees. “We wanna feel generous.”
Our thanks to Raccoon Logic, Erick Bilodeau, and Reid Schneider for taking the time to show and speak with us about Revenge of the Savage Planet.
