The nightmare was real, the situation was not.
Revenge of the Savage Planet, an adventure spread across a number of distant — and quite savage! — planets, invites nonlinear exploration. To complete its missions and discover all of its secrets, you must leap into an unknown where the otherworldly flora, fauna, and even the inorganic material are primed to kill you. So, shortly after assembling an underwater scooter that allowed my robot sidekick to whisk me through the depths of alien oceans, I descended into a series of caverns under the Zenithian Rift to see what was going on down there. The specters of death I encountered below weren’t even designed to haunt me.
In Raccoon Logic’s sequel to Journey to the Savage Planet, players are tasked with scanning every object in every nook and cranny to assemble an exhaustive log of materials located on each planet. At first, the task is a walk in the (overgrown killer) park: find a tree, scan a tree. Find a slobbering beastie, scan a slobbering beastie. But a counter on the map charting your scannables becomes the most daunting subtask — can I really find every single micro scannable? I found myself longing after completing the core missions. To really 100% this, there was even more reason to venture into the most uninviting spaces, including a dark underwater cave on Zenithian Rift that absolutely did not look like it contained any scannable items. But I couldn’t not go in there.
It took about two seconds for me to realize… I had made a horrible mistake. While the cave was easily accessible from the water, there were no enemy or collectible breadcrumbs to suggest this was a place the folks at Raccoon Logic intended for me to. I was lured in by curiosity, but the joy of discovery in Revenge of the Savage Planet got the best of me. Now I was stuck. I had stumbled into a graphical anomaly, an in-game black hole that had an entrance but no apparent exit.
In Revenge of the Savage Planet, you can’t beam back to starting locations on the fly or off yourself in order to respawn from your last save. In a clever but likely divisive design choice, the game forces you to navigate to transporters spread across the worlds in order to beam off to your next desired location, which forces traversal and new encounters. But it meant that while bumbling around in the dark, hoping to find a way out of my watery grave, I couldn’t simply die and move on. I was actually trapped, and in a scenario I haven’t experienced in quite some time, feeling IRL like I was actually trapped.
I already don’t do well with underwater levels out of an intense fear of drowning. Luckily for me, most games will throw me the lifeline of a visual countdown to illustrate oxygen levels, ensuring (1) I surface in time and (2) I don’t hyperventilate over the stress of surfacing in time. Revenge of the Savage Planet doesn’t need that because there’s no punishment for enjoying the waters; you’re already in a spacesuit and the challenges you encounter via underwater scooter require a bunch of time-intensive back and forth. Doing it all on limited air would simply not be fun. But that meant, stuck in this tight underwater cave, I would never die. I was in limbo. Or maybe I was in hell.
I spent far too long searching for a route out. Streaks of light bled in from a theoretical escape that I could never reach — any time I thought I was close, I bumped into a new rock and found myself jetting in the opposite direction. Not since I watched The Rescue, the riveting-yet-terrifying documentary about the team of divers who squeezed through cave passageways to free 12 trapped Thai soccer players, had my apparent claustrophobia had its way with my nerves. I can’t quite explain why I pushed myself over the edge to find an in-game solution to this unintentional challenge, except to say that I really wanted to do a good job at Revenge of the Savage Planet.
Most glitches are considered errors by programmers, annoyances by players, and occasionally shortcuts for the speedrunner crowd. Revenge of the Savage Planet’s death cave might fall into the first two categories, but it’s a harrowing experience I ultimately appreciated, a unique screw up that could only happen in a game. I have never felt truly trapped in a film, despite the best efforts of 3D stereoscopic effects and 4DX rumble seats. After finally rebooting Revenge of the Savage Planet, I had to give myself a few minutes to let my heart rate die down before I grabbed the controller. But I got right back to it. Sure, this was a glitch, but in a game where exploration is everything, leaping into a true unknown — one that the creators of the game clearly didn’t intend me to find — was its own form of success.
Revenge of the Savage Planet is currently available for PC, Playstation, and Xbox, and it’s currently on Game Pass.
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