If you were to put Revenge of the Savage Planet and its predecessor side-by-side, we wouldn’t fault you for thinking that they were from different franchises. To be clear, there’s a lot in common between the two – much like Journey to the Savage Planet, developer Raccoon Logic’s latest tasks players with exploring the unknown, going face-to-face with bizarre (and often deadly) flora and fauna, and contending with an all-too-unfeeling employer (or in this case, former employer, seeing as how your player character is fired at the beginning of their journey). What is very different this time around is how you’ll take it all in, literally. 

Revenge of the Savage Planet pulls things back a bit, with the camera shifting from a first-person perspective to third-person. This might seem like a minor change on paper, but after getting our first look at the game earlier this week, we were surprised at just how different it is moment-to-moment.

“One of the benefits of switching to third person is we can put more physical comedy on the player,” explained Alex Hutchinson, who serves as Raccoon Logic’s creative director. “We found that with a systemic world, you wanted to see when you're on fire, or when you’re slipping,” which, as the team quickly discovered, is hard to convey in first-person. “There's only so much – as our animation director Mike says – you can do with hands, plus people wanted to see their feet for platforming.”

While we haven’t had the chance to go hands-on with the game just yet, it didn’t take long to see how well this change aligns with Raccoon Logic’s sense of humor. There’s an almost slapstick feel to the way your brave explorer makes their way around the game’s five explorable planets (we did the math, that’s 400% more planets than last time!), especially as you contend with the various types of Goo, which function both as environmental obstacles and tools for the player to use. Walking through Green Goo lets you show off your best impression of a Buster Keaton banana peel slip, but it can also be used against your enemies to trip them up. Ferro-Goo, on the other hand, is a bit less of a walking hazard, but it’s also conductive, letting you chain electric current over different surfaces. Journey to the Savage Planet’s trademark slap has even been retired, but it’s been replaced by something even better – an overly exaggerated kick that can send the fluffiest of exotic fauna sailing through the air.

Revenge of the Savage Planet certainly looks and plays differently with the shift to a third-person view, but the core loop of exploring, scanning environments, gathering resources, crafting new tools, and unlocking new areas is as strong as ever.

“It's essentially still a Metroidvania at its heart,” Hutchinson assured us. “You land with no gear, and you’ll have to keep upgrading your gear to progress further in the world. There are lots of new tools, there are whips, there are Goo guns, all kinds of stuff to upgrade. Many of them are required to get to the end of the game, but many are also optional, depending on how you want to play. We're really trying to widen the play space to let people experience the game the way they want.”

These design goals also help to explain the larger scope Revenge of the Savage Planet is aiming for, though we couldn’t help but wonder if "Revenge of the Savage Planets" would be a more suitable name for this particular sequel. After solving a few environmental puzzles and fending off a few hostile creatures, the team gave us a glimpse of one of the other worlds: a desert planet teeming with its own unique plant life. Given the level of physical comedy on display, it should have come as no surprise that our industrious explorer reached their new destination in the most over-the-top fashion; not by spaceship, but by space cannon, Evel Knievel style.

“Each planet has its own physical theme as well,” Hutchinson explained, after arriving on this new planet. “This one's quite broad and full of empty distances between pockets of gameplay. There's a sort of icy volcano planet, which is very, very vertical. I think Steve [Masters, the game’s director] was saying it has around 500 meters of verticality, which was a big part of the first game, and we wanted to bring that back.”

With several planets to explore, countless creatures to fight (or collect for your research pen, if you’re the scientific type), and plenty of secrets to unearth, Revenge of the Savage Planet is begging you (and a co-op buddy, if you’d like) to explore to your heart’s content when it launches next year. For those of you that can't wait that long, you can always tide yourself over by checking out Journey to the Savage Planet, which is currently on sale through January 9.