Movies like 2001 and Moon and Alien worked because they had stories to tell, and they told them in a relatively streamlined fashion. Lifeless Planet may evoke those cinematic classics, but it also shows the difficulty in translating them to game form. It’s about as exciting as you’d expect, unfortunately. Walking, walking, walking, with the occasional jump thrown in for good measure. Walking over badlands and wastelands, walking through tunnels and over power lines, walking through empty villages and abandoned warehouses. You occasionally glimpse a single alien being in the distance, but for the most part you’re just walking and uncovering scraps of paper, and solving the occasional (very easy) puzzle. Instead, you’re mainly just roaming the deserted landscape, trying to piece together what happened both to your crewmates and to the abandoned Soviet civilization that was apparently wiped out before you even arrived. As you walk around the titular planet, you aren’t constantly fighting off aliens or uncovering amazing treasures.
So how does Lifeless Planet do it? By taking a page from the likes of Moon, Alien, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, and focusing largely on mood and atmosphere over fast-paced action. In fact, it does so without any of the usual trappings of those other “cinematic” aspirants: there’s no combat, barely any sign of enemies, and the main character is pretty much a blank slate. Impressively, it does so without the aid of big set pieces or expensive-looking cutscenes. And yet, for all that those “cinematic” AAA games are trying to achieve, for all the time and money that went into creating those games (sorry, “experiences”), it’s quite possible that Lifeless Planet comes closer to accomplishing it than anything else I’ve ever played. It’s a fact, for better and for worse, of modern gaming. Out of that desire, you get epic stories, dazzling graphics, cutscenes and large-scale action sequences that seem lifted straight out of a Hollywood blockbusters, etc. Uncharted, Assassin’s Creed, Ryse, God of War: all of them (and many others like them) want to be thought them not simply as games, but as quasi-movies in their scope and ambition. A lot of AAA games aspire to be “cinematic”.
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