Two Best Friends and a Naive Dream: Make a Cinematic Platformer

In 2018, two close friends since middle school, Adam Stjärnljus and Klas Eriksson, decide to make a video game based on an evocative drawing by Adam showing a plain-looking boy in a beautiful field, standing next to a strange little creature and, nearby, a similarly odd robot. 

This is that drawing:

They drained their savings to hire a part-time programmer, hoping to execute a simple plan: bring that drawing to life and show the world they could make The Next Great Video Game.

“Then, five months came and went and we had this very bad prototype and publishers slaughtered us,” laughed Stjärnljus in an interview with Remap.

Five years later, that busted prototype would become 2023’s gorgeous Planet of Lana, one of many so-called “cinematic platformers” that have come in the wake of games like Limbo and Inside, experiences where the aesthetics of the world are nearly as important as the gameplay.

“It was like three years of just pitching the game and working on it and failing miserably at so many stuff,” said Stjärnljus. “We'd never made games professionally before. Almost everyone in the team never had worked on games before. It was a lot of trial and error.”

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Today, the sequel arrives, and like the original, it’s co-directed by both Stjärnljus and Eriksson. 

I’ve played several hours of Planet of Lana II, and if you like games like it, you’re likely to enjoy your time revisiting this world. It’s also the most mechanically dense cinematic platformer in a minute, especially compared to Reanimal, the new game from the former Little Nightmare developers. The “game” part of cinematic platforms is often loose, but not in Planet of Lana II, where you arguably spend more time unpacking puzzles than you do admiring the landscape.

Cinematic platformer is not in Planet of Lana II’s official description on Steam. It’s “adventure” and “puzzle platformer.” On PlayStation and Switch, it’s “action.” On Xbox, it’s “action & adventure.” And when you ask the developers, they even use a slightly different description.

“I think the best description I would give to Planet of Lana is a cinematic puzzle adventure,” said Stjärnljus. “Yes, it is a platformer, but it's not that important part of it. It's a side-scrolling platformer, yes, but it's really an adventure—a cinematic puzzle adventure.”

Okay, so we’ve got a new term: cinematic puzzle adventure! But the history that Planet of Lana is pulling from is actually very specific and old, and comes from the duo’s history with games like 1991’s Another World (also known as Out of this World), an early trailblazer in an era where no one was using the term cinematic platformer, and 1997’s quirky Oddworld: Abe’s Odyssey.

“The important point is to use the flaw of media to express something with it, to use it as a medium,” said Another World designer Éric Chahi in a retrospective interview with Eurogamer from 2007, celebrating the game’s 15th anniversary. “As example, polygons are angular; I incorporate it in the style of Another World. Always better suggest the reality than copying it.”

Fast forward a bit, and it’s now 34 years since the release of Another World.

“It’s really nice sometimes with the constraints of a side-scroller,” said Stjärnljus. “Because coming from a film and animation background like we do, it's very nice to be able to limit what the viewer, what the player can see, and frame scenes and set the tone. You’re traveling sideways and you can't see what's coming ahead, but you can see the foreground and where you are.”

That “film and animation background” is from the production company the two started together before making Planet of Lana, building off their shared love of movies, music, and games over several decades. It’s a bond that goes all the way back in Sweden’s equivalent of middle school.