The golden age of animation reveled in absurdity. In the heyday of the Looney Tunes, Daffy Duck might get squashed and stretched, flattened like a pancake, and careen off a cliff all in the span of a minute. It’s an energy that’s surprisingly hard to come by in modern video games. Unless you’re loading up Earthworm Jim on a Sega Genesis Mini or dialing the nostalgia way back with Cuphead, the elastic legacy of cartoons is hard to come by in interactive animation.
There is no shortage of plummeting off tall objects in AAA titles, but rarely do trip-ups in an adventure game summon the energy of Tex Avery or Chuck Jones (the result is usually just aggravating fall damage). So why don’t game animators cartoon like they used to?
Raccoon Logic creative director and co-founder Alex Hutchinson has asked the same question — and his answer was to produce the funniest game I’ve played in ages, Revenge of the Savage Planet. To tell the story of a worker drone stranded on an alien planet, and outrunning hordes of deadly creatures, Hutchinson and the Raccoon Logic team combined Coyote-versus-Roadrunner antics with Tim & Eric-style satire and a gross-out sensibility fit for Monty Python fans. It’s a romp with Unreal Engine polish.
“It’s always been interesting to me that comedy is a huge part of film and TV and theatre and writing but such a tiny part of gaming, and the humor that does exist is usually in the script, which means we’ve been making poor men’s versions of other media,” Hutchinson told Polygon over email. “For a game to be funny, the comedy needs to be in the gamepad, not the script.”
Image: Raccoon Logic via Polygon
Revenge of the Savage Planet is a sequel to 2020’s Journey to the Savage Planet, a game Hutchinson and the team at Typhoon Studios developed for Stadia Games. When Google shut down Stadia and Typhoon in early 2021, the core team behind Journey to the Savage Planet regrouped to form the Montreal-based Raccoon Logic, with an eye toward reclaiming the Savage Planet intellectual property. Revenge isn’t more of the same; with a switch of perspectives from first- to third-person, Raccoon Logic has created a “contained open-world” adventure that often feels like Zelda by way of Rick & Morty (minus any motormouthed guns).
Building comedy into Revenge’s DNA, instead of just lacing its dialogue with jokes, meant constructing the game’s multiple planetary biomes and the weapon arsenal you use to survive them all with laughs in mind. For the team at Raccoon Logic, that meant balancing the many platforming challenges, boss encounters, and secret-hunting missions so that the game was never frustrating, but always surprising. The game has a number of collectible tools — a magnetic fork, a proton whip, a slime collector — that seem simple at first but “have weird consequences” as players delve deeper. As I charted skyscraper-sized cliffs on Stellaris Prime and grinded light rails across the lava pits of Zenithian Rift, the possibilities of how to complete any one mission felt endless in a Breath of the Wild-like way. Failing in a spectacular, splattered fashion was its own fun.
“We wanted the player to be lured into weird parts of the map, then be surprised by something, and hopefully get entangled in a physical disaster,” Hutchinson said. “We also never punish the player excessively: if you die, you drop your stuff and are reprinted from the Meat Buddy(™) organ reclaimer in your habitat, and can just play on. If it’s too hard it’s frustrating and not funny and people don’t experiment. Then we wanted the happy accidents to affect creatures as well and then the second player to be an agent of chaos. The feeling was in that chaotic soup there’d be enough emergent humor to carry the game.”
Revenge of the Savage Planet’s humor clicked for me when I first saw my astronaut walk around home base. Animation director Mike Mennillo said that Looney Tunes was a huge inspiration for the character motion, but that “‘don’t go full Looney Tunes” is a phrase used a lot when we pushed it too far,” he said. The lanky explorer’s gait is perfectly exaggerated, and downright excessive when running, when our hero looks like he might go full QWOP if he trips over the wrong alien plant. I spent a lot of time spinning my camera into a sidescroller perspective just to watch my guy zip around like a fool.
GIF: Raccoon Logic via Polygon
“Our creative director said often the character can tell a joke but they cannot BE a joke,” Mennillo said. “Rachet and Clank was also a big inspiration — everything moved so fluidly and I wanted to emulate that. The walk and run were the first two animations done for the main character and, because everyone loved the jaunty feel so much, they actually dictated the tone for the rest of the game.”
Jokes explode from every corner of Revenge of the Savage Planet. In the game, the hero astronaut is sent on a colonizing mission by slimeball corporation Alta — then mostly left to die out after a crash. Throughout the survival missions, Alta repeatedly spams the habitat with in-world ads for futuristic products like food replacement New Grob 2 and the Portal Potty, which allows you to “scoot your scat to another dimension.” The videos were all created by “anti-mation” video director Davy Force, who Hutchinson heralded as a “one-stop shop” for producing their dystopian vision. I may not read every page of every book in a 70-hour RPG, but any time I died and got pummeled by a fake ad beamed in from Earth, I couldn’t look away.
Then there’s the goo. So much good. Between the game’s popping tongue-wagging critters to the variants of gushing populating the planets, Revenge of the Savage Planet has more splatter than a Gallagher show. And the goo isn’t just for show; green goo is slippery and flammable, while purple goo conducts electricity that can be collected and sprayed out when the time is right. Absolutely disgusting sound effects give the liquid effects that chef’s kiss touch.
“Big reactions from small player inputs are always funny, so [we wanted] lots of exploding goo barrels and lots of creatures fountaining goo.” Hutchinson wrote. “We also took some inspiration from Ghostbusters and Men in Black and movies like that, so we filled all the planets with creatures that are full of goo, barf goo, explode into goo and we wanted it to be more than just visuals, so it also has a systemic layer which changes the play space.”
The team at Raccoon Logic makes the animated mayhem of Revenge of the Savage Planet look easy — the relentless of the gags never interfered with my desire to actually complete the missions. So why don’t we see more games like it? Hutchinson isn’t sure everyone could get away with it, even if they wanted to push game comedy that far.
“One of the joys of not having a big mainstream publisher is you don’t have to turn every strong flavour into mush. Big publishers are terrified of offending people, so they whittle off the extreme edges and the strong flavours, and that makes games safer and more boring in my opinion. Horror and comedy are the two genres where I think you need to take the most risk: it’s not for everyone. But if you don’t push the boundaries, then you’ll make something for no one.”
Revenge of the Savage Planet is currently available for PC, Playstation, and Xbox, and it’s currently on Game Pass.
