Audio logs scattered throughout the game world similarly explain what's going on, but not why, and some very basic questions that come up over the course of the story go completely unanswered. Snippets of a pre-launch interview with the lead character, some of which you can hear in pre-release promotional trailers, are delivered at a very uneven pace, with gaps of multiple levels between them that leave them feeling out of place and almost entirely pointless. A volunteer astronaut on a one-way journey in search of a life-sustaining planet instead discovers a barren and inhospitable wasteland, and with his fellow. The story itself is less interesting than it initially appears, but the delivery is problematic as well. Lifeless Planet fumbles toward profundity, with big ideas about the nature of life, the universe and everything that it just can't quite put its finger on.

And that was precisely the outcome: All the promise embodied in the image of a near-future astronaut coming over a ridge to discover a Soviet textbook half-buried in the sand of an alien world goes largely unfulfilled, and while the story does move through the requisite steps from beginning to end, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I wished it was over well before it actually was, even though I knew the plot hadn't advanced nearly far enough to provide a satisfying conclusion.

Lifeless Planet's real problem is that it drags on far longer than it should, with no real reward for persevering through it. It's beautiful in places, peppered with stunning alien vistas and appropriately haunting music, but levels often change without any kind of transition: I'm in one place, and then suddenly I'm in a brand-new environment, with no clear idea of how it happened.

So much of the game feels nakedly arbitrary and disjointed. Tanks of jetpack fuel that allow me to jump much further and higher than normal in some areas very suddenly run out once those areas are cleared, and when I needed to clear out blocked passages, there was always dynamite lying conveniently nearby. The presence of the arm at all feels forced, and it's not alone in that regard.

Lifeless planet premier edition plot