Revenge of the Savage Planet spins Google Stadia trauma into comedy gold

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Table of Contents Explore-em-up Goofing on Google

The gaming news cycle is so hectic these days that it’s easy to completely forget about a ridiculous industry saga. I was reminded of that while demoing Revenge of the Savage Planet, the latest game from Racoon Logic. When I sat down to try a demo of it ahead of The Game Awards last week, I was greeted by a satirical introduction as a corporate orientation video cheerfully explained that I was an employee on a dangerous mission. As it played, the developer showing me the demo made a crack about Google. I didn’t really understand why, so I laughed and moved on.

It wasn’t until a few minutes later that a long-forgotten thought came back to me. In 2019, Google acquired Typhoon Studios. They were folded into what was supposed to be Google’s first-party game studio, Stadia Games and Entertainment. Two years later, the entire project was shut down and Typhoon Games was spat back out. It formed Racoon Logic later that year, putting the team back to where it started as an indie team.

That isn’t just a strange bit of gaming history; it’s the backbone to Revenge of the Savage Planet. The upcoming adventure game is a fiercely satirical corporate comedy that takes clear jabs at the team’s former overlords. It’s the exact comedic zinger that Google leadership likely deserves following its Stadia disaster.

Explore-em-up

Return to the Savage Planet is a sequel to 2020’s Journey to the Savage Planet, a first-person sci-fi comedy that drew clear inspiration from Metroid Prime. It combined shooting, environmental scanning, and anti-capitalist satire to build a farcical Metroidvania about an employee for Kindred Aerospace who is tasked with traveling to an alien planet and determining if it can be safely colonized. Naturally, that leads to killing a lot of local wildlife and looting the planet’s resources.

The sequel has a similar workplace comedy of errors premise, though players control an employee who is taken out