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Marvellyous rated Petty Puny Planet

Marvellyous rated a Petty Puny Planet 275 days ago
A browser Petty Puny Planet made in HTML5.

A silly comedy game, fun idea but ultimately a bit dull to actually play, so I only made two or three planets.

The general gist is that you have a planet and you get to choose an option that affects the way the people on it develop. 100 years pass, then you get to see how your choice affected the planet and then choose a new option, with the goal being to find all of the possible different endings, seemingly by meeting certain requirements and choosing certain options.

The problem for me is that for a comedy game it's not particularly funny; I think maybe it's aimed at a younger audience with more a "lol random" sense of humour than me and it definitely feels like the type of game I'd have played on newgrounds when I was like 12. Now as a 33 year old however I find the writing a bit stale, as it's rarely actually making jokes it's more just stating things and expecting them to be funny when accompanied by the accessories your planet has acquired. The gameplay isn't that interesting either as half the time the choices are the same until you've hit a hidden prerequisite like having enough money or happiness or whatever, and half of the time you end up with repeating results after a choice if you still haven't hit a prerequisite; either a random event from a rather limited number of them (you'll see repeats pretty often) or nothing happens. It's dull and repetitive on one run, nevermind if you're playing multiple times in order to get all of the endings. It reminds me of those alchemy games where you combine different things to get a new element or resource. However, those games are typically puzzles, requiring you to use some form of logic to test out combining different elements to unlock new ones e.g. fire+water = steam. In contrast this game is more like throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.

A minor issue I had is the way the game treats a planet's people; they tend to act more like a single nation rather than a whole planet. And I know it doesn't matter, it's a silly comedy game where your planet can get a beard, it's not going for realism so this shouldn't matter, but a petty part of me just thinks it would be more accurate if the planets were nations instead, or that the game might benefit from thinking of the people of the planet as multiple different civilisations rather than a mostly unified people.

So to conclude: I found the gameplay dull and the comedy lacking, which is a shame as I thought the concept had promise