I found Planet Alpha to be a fun, short little game that was well worth the 4 dollars I paid for it. The game has no dialogue, but does a great job of showing rather than telling. You play as an alien explorer on a hostile planet. You can move, jump, time-manipulate, and crouch-walk your way through various threats in your consistent effort to reach the right edge of the screen.
A HOSTILE PLANET
The first thing emotions struck me upon starting up Planet Alpha were concern and regret. You start the game moving (very slowly) across a dead, featureless landscape. If I wanted that, I'd have moved to Arizona. Don't come after me; Arizona has some redeeming features... I just don't think humans should live anywhere where they're dependent on functioning climate control systems as a condition for survival. If a power outage is a life-threatening problem for you in July, I think you should move somewhere more hospitable, where there's also water.
Eventually the setting improved; the desert gave way to hills, valleys, forests, and more - and did so beautifully. Say what you will about Planet Alpha, Adrian Lazar (who apparently has little online presence to link towards) envisioned a gorgeous world in vibrant color that brings immediate comparisons to properties with proportionally enormous budgets like Avatar.
The creatures of Planet Alpha are varied and fantastical, and include giant sauropod-like alien herbivores, soaring pink tentacled sky-whales, propeller-shaped color-changing bird-things, and all manner of creatures besides. Many of the flora and fauna mean you harm, but most of them are entirely peaceful or ignore the player's presence, existing on a grander or more removed scale in a way that makes you feel small and insignificant as a player.
By contrast, there are also robots that are entirely hostile, and always searching for you. The robots were clearly designed differently - they are much more conventional in a way that looks ripped from early Dr. Who or from Lost in Space. This means that they (probably intentionally) don't feel native to Planet Alpha at all. As they do battle with the planet's various flora throughout the game, they force you the player to feel empathy for the strange aliens they slaughter, and a sense of victory every time the robotic invaders explode. I'm into it - death to the machines!
SURVIVAL BY TRIAL AND ERROR
In general, Planet Alpha is a side-scrolling, stealthy, puzzly platformer. Gameplay consists of jumping over things, climbing on things, pushing things around, and crouching to hide behind various objects. Enemies move in a 3d world around your 2d plane, which means that you'll end up hiding above, below, or in front/behind objects in the games fore and backgrounds.
The game also features a neat time-control mechanic it uses for puzzle solving. This mechanic has nothing to do with objects in the world around you, but instead manipulates the astral bodies (the sun) in the sky overhead. Sometimes you use this to force nocturnal, fungal platforms to grow by switching day to night, in order to jump across their vibrant, mushroom-like caps. Other times you'll switch nighttime to day in order to encourage a diurnal alien creature to return to an area and attack nearby robots, giving you a distraction so you can sneak past.
Very often, you'll die horribly. There is no direct combat in Planet Alpha; you never get a laser gun, shield, or melee weapon. You're not particularly agile at avoiding enemies either, so you'll watch often as a robot fires a few blasts from their gun and blows you away. This isn't really a problem - it's just a sign that you haven't figured out (yet) how to get past that enemy/threat and move to the next one. You'll reload in the same spot to try again. I confess I did have to google a couple of the puzzles, usually to learn that their solution involved backtracking farther than I had considered in order to find a helpful tool (a pushable block, or a destructible tree, a broken elevator, etc) to find victory.
REACHING THE END
My main gripe with Planet Alpha is that while the game is gorgeous, and it does a fine job of narrative without dialogue, and exploration is satisfying... I didn't really find the actual minute-to-minute gameplay to be that much fun. Interesting, compelling, surprising, but rarely joyful. I was curious to see the end of it, and glad that I reached that end... but I never really got lost in the game or wanted to live in the world it presented.
There are only eight chapters to Planet Alpha - each of them full of spectacle and exploration in a dangerous world. It isn't long, but it is a very smart game, in the way that Star Trek is a smart show. I definitely enjoyed it and would recommend it to anyone who wants to explore a vibrant and unique alien world for a few hours. I give it seven beautiful alien fungi out of ten.