The sequel to one of our favourite games of 2023, Planet of Lana II: Children of the Leaf has a lot to live up to.
Apparently Lana's parents have been busy and she now has a little sister, Anua. Your first task is to accompany her to find Mui, Lana's cat-bunny type-thing from the first game. Once found, you get a short training session on Mui's basic skills, and Mui can be called by holding 'B' or told to 'stay' by pressing it. Mui's skillset has improved, and now you can send it to a waypoint to perform an action at a certain time, rather than just tell them to 'stay' in a certain spot. Mui also has other new abilities, including being able to take control of various creatures and frazzle electrical components.
As with Planet of Lana 1, the puzzles can be obvious but can also be real head scratchers, and Mui's new abilities add to the complexity and cleverness of the solutions.
There's actually quite a lot of dialogue in this sequel, which is all in some alien language, so while you get the general gist of most conversations, it'd have been nice to have a translation.
I'd love to tell you that Planet of Lana 2 is a game for all the family, but some of the deaths are violent, some of the creatures are creepy as heck, some of the puzzles are MENSA standard and some of the platform sequences require pixel-perfect split-second timing, so kids and casual gamers might be overwhelmed.
The plot and some of the design borrows more than a hint of Star Wars/Empire Strikes Back and fighting an evil empire, who seem set on mining the crap out of Lana's planet, so maybe a hint of Avatar too. After a jaunt to destroy the enemy's massive mining machine inspired by a boy named Orin, your village is destroyed in revenge, and the tribal leader and grandfather figure, Rakuen, is killed, so Lana goes looking for revenge...
You don't just play as Lana with assistance from Mui this time either, you also get to see Mui's origin story and how it gets help from a heroic robot named Temati. It certainly gives the game some added depth, but the alien language meant I found the plot hard to follow–particularly the ending, which was quite ambiguous, and left me yearning for Planet of Lana 3.
Should you buy Planet of Lana II: Children of the Leaf? If you played the first game or you're a fan of classics of the side-scrolling platform/puzzle adventure genre such as Flashback, Limbo and Inside, then yes, definitely. At a price of only £16.99 (and it's currently on Game Pass) it's unmissable, and if you're new to the franchise, Planet of Lana 1 & 2 are available as a bundle for only £28.99!
Many thanks to Wishfully Studios, Thunderful and Plan of Attack