Preview | Planet Scanner - Planets, Please!

Planet Scanner starts as a simple simulator game, not dissimilar to the thousands of other Noun Simulator games on Steam. You are a Planet Scanner, employed by ScanCorp to scan as many planets as you can in your ten-hour night shifts, because as we all know in the world of intergalactic real estate, finders keepers.

You get your assignment for the day - maybe your bureaucratic bosses need you to find an icy planet or a giant one, or perhaps they need you to find eight billion dollars worth of planets. For every planet you scan on behalf of ScanCorp, you earn one CorpBuck. You can use these to improve your equipment or buy cosmetic improvements for your claustrophobic, cell-like room. No, you can’t be paid in dollars, what an absurd question.

The demo for Planet Scanner only lasts about 30 minutes so it was hard to get a real sense of how this element of the game will play out, but I get the impression that the monetary threshold for the planets you have to upload each day will increase frequently. There’s an encyclopedia that gives a ton of detail about various traits that increase the value of a planet (like its temperature or gravity in comparison to Earth) and many of the purchasable upgrades are upgrades that reveal this additional information when you scan a planet. 

So the puzzle becomes, when you can only upload the data of three planets, how do you meet your value target? It has a certain kind of appeal, especially to someone like me who lives to optimise. Frankly, if that was all there was to Planet Scanner and it became a kind of Luck Be A Landlord exponentially increasing difficulty challenge of optimisation, I’d be interested, but that isn’t everything there is to Planet Scanner.

Soon after you start your new role as a ScanCorp Planet Scanner, your bosses discover the ability to detect signals coming from planets, so it becomes your job to locate signals and decode them. They start off pretty benign. “Whaaaaaazzzzzzzzzaaaaaap??” enquires the first one. Fairly rapidly though, things start to get decidedly creepier. “It’s too late. We can hear you,” comes one ominous entry. The last signal you decode as the demo ends is a threatening warning: “We are coming.”

With such a short demo that ends as soon as things start to get interesting, it’s hard to get a handle on whether the plot of Planet Scanner will be especially engaging beyond its fascinating set-up.  How well the game will transition towards its stated intent of being a horror game and whether the gameplay elements will have any sticking power, but I’m certainly intrigued.

Besides all that, even with my short time with Planet Scanner, I am happy to report that this game has incredible vibes. The music is the perfect mixture of upbeat and unsettling, and the aesthetics are exactly what you’d expect from a space horror with Lovecraftian elements. I mean, your bed is coffin-shaped for God’s sake. The contempt for capitalism is dripping off this game in great globs.

Despite being a short demo that holds its cards close to its chest, Planet Scanner has left me wanting more, and if that isn’t the sign of a good demo, what is?