Planet of Lana II: Children of the Leaf

Planet of Lana was a really positive surprise when it landed in spring 2023. It was a 2D puzzle platformer, a "Limbo/Inside/Little Nightmares/Unravel-like" if you will, but with a much lighter tone and fantastic visuals reminiscent of something Studio Ghibli might have created. However, it was the debut game from the small Swedish developer Wishfully Studios from Gothenburg and a truly successful debut at that.

Now the difficult second instalment, Planet of Lana II: Children of the Leaf, is ready for release on most platforms as well as on Game Pass, and it follows in the footsteps of the first game, perhaps a little too much, but we'll get to that in a moment.

At the centre of it all is once again the girl Lana and her faithful companion, the adorable little cat-like wool ball Mui. It all still takes place in a colourful and beautiful world where machines and mechanical structures meet beautiful and lush nature, and beneath the surface there is still an inexplicable unease that you gradually become acquainted with.

Lana must save her sister Anua, who has fallen ill after coming into contact with a mysterious object. Therefore, Lana and Mui are sent out into the world to find three ingredients that can heal her sister: a rare mountain flower that grows in the cold and inaccessible mountains, a mussel shell found deep below the surface of the sea, and a sacred deer that lives deep in a dark forest.

The first thing you inevitably notice when playing Planet of Lana II is the truly beautiful visuals. The forest with its enormous tree trunks and lush green forest floor, the sea with its shiny surface and the almost unnatural blue sky, the small, cosy villages with wooden huts, where it's clear that a quiet life is lived, and the dark and cold metal structures and laboratory-like buildings, which stand in sharp contrast to the beautiful nature, but which emphasise a world where nature and metal structures coexist. It's truly beautiful and several times you stop just to take in the postcard image that appears on your screen.

Planet of Lana II takes place two years after the first game, and Lana still lives in the small idyllic fishing village on the edge of the forest. She has grown bigger and more agile than before, and she still has the ever-cute Mui by her side. Lana can still run, jump, climb ropes, pull herself up from ledges, and now she can also glide through low passages at high speed. Since Mui is a cat-like animal, it's much more agile, and you can use a point-and-click system to send Mui through narrow openings or up onto platforms that Lana herself has no chance of reaching. From there, Mui can, for example, activate an elevator, open a door, send a rope down to Lana, bite through wires so that machines and surveillance cameras go dark, and a lot of other things. It works really well and Mui is often used wisely in most of the game's puzzles.

A large part of the gameplay in Planet of Lana II is puzzle solving. Some of these puzzles are quite well thought out, and a few of them made me stop and scratch my head a bit, but the solution usually presented itself before it became frustrating. Several other puzzles are perhaps a little on the simple side, where Lana has to run between two hiding places to avoid being seen, hiding in tall grass, pushing boxes to the right places, and deactivating security systems. As mentioned, Mui is used quite well in most puzzles, but it feels like we've seen most of it before, while there are a few slightly larger puzzles that stand out. Overall, the puzzle gameplay works well and never becomes frustrating or confusing.

Mui is once again a central part of the game, and there are even smaller missions where you play exclusively as Mui, who has a bigger role in Planet of Lana II than in the first game. The little cat-like animal still doesn't like water, of course, so Lana often has to transport Mui across water on tree trunks or water lily-like plants, which also act as a kind of diving bell for Mui, as the water lily closes around the little animal when Lana pulls the plant under water.

Lana can also control other creatures and machines that she and Mui encounter along the way. A couple of examples are the small squids in the sea, which can create clouds of dark ink underwater in front of cameras placed in enemy buildings, so they cannot see Lana when she swims past them, or the cute black flying woolly balls that can suck water from the forest lakes and pour it over flowers, which in turn shoot a long stem out of the ground that Lana can climb.

If you have played the first Planet of Lana, you will recognise some of the above, and that is because, as mentioned at the beginning, Planet of Lana II follows in the footsteps of the first game very closely. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because the first game worked so well, but if you expect a big step forward in this sequel, you will be disappointed. Instead, this is a refinement of many of the mechanics and ideas from the first game, but with various new small additions that make the game an even more cohesive experience.

We have already mentioned the incredibly beautiful visuals, which are fortunately supported by an equally beautiful soundtrack. It's once again composed by Takeshi Furukawa, who was also behind the soundtrack for the first game and who has also composed music for The Last Guardian and the TV series Star Wars: The Clone Wars. There are long periods without any music, but suddenly the beautiful soundtrack emerges, for example when Lana comes to an opening in the forest and you can see out over the open plains and valleys, where the soundtrack is used really well and sounds excellent.

Planet of Lana II: Children of the Leaf is an excellent cinematic 2D puzzle-platformer that tells a simple but emotional story. It's told entirely without words and through a babbling language, combined with movements, music, tonality, and Muis's constant body language, where the little animal curls up when it feels unsafe, lays its ears back when it gets angry and twitches its legs a little when it feels uncertain. It's impressive that so much of the story can be conveyed without words, but in the places with text, the localisation could undoubtedly be improved.

Planet of Lana II: Children of the Leaf does not set any new standards for the genre and continues in the footsteps of the first game, so if you liked Wishfully's debut game from 2023, this sequel is a no-brainer. I would actually recommend it to anyone looking for a beautiful little story disguised as a puzzle game. I completed it in just under seven hours and they were seven really good hours. So once again, you can safely take a trip to Lana's planet, and you won't regret this second journey either.