I really butchered the lyrics from Cyborg 009's closing song, but oh well. Lifeless Planet! You are an astronaut, sent to a distant world as part of a crew to begin the work of preparing it for possible human habitation. Your ship crashes, probably because someone forgot to convert from metric to Imperial. You wake up alone, and set out to find your crew, only to find you aren't the first people here. There's the remains of a Soviet farming village amongst the dust. But though they apparently got here decades ago, there's no Soviets now.
Maybe. There's someone else running around, and unlike you, they don't wear a spacesuit. And you quickly figure out neither of you is the only lifeform on this planet, and the locals are not welcoming.
I'm not sure really sure how to describe the gameplay. There's a bit of platforming, when you're using the thruster on your suit to jump from one rocky outcropping to the next. Sometimes you find a canister that gives you extended boost - always when you're just about to need it - and it always runs out once you get past the spot where it was required (similarly, a couple of times the game informs you you're low on oxygen, but there's no gauge, it just happens when the story demands it.) It's weird, because the instructions the first time you use the extended boost read like your best bet is one sustained burn, but that didn't work for me. I had to do a bunch of rapid button taps, like I was almost Mario-hopping or Samus double-jumping across the gaps.
There's a bit of puzzle-solving, in the form of pushing things until they fit together, or block something, or open something. Very basic. A little ways into the game you find a mechanical arm to attach to your suit - considerate of those '70s Soviets to build their stuff to be compatible with 21st Century American technology! - that you use to pick things up and drop them in places, or to poke buttons until you open something. Even that doesn't involve you finding something that reveals the sequence. You just keep poking buttons. If it was the right one, there's a green light. If not, red. Repeat until the thing opens, turns on, whatever.
Unfortunately, contact sensitivity is wonky, especially when you're supposed to push something. The first "puzzle" was me needing to roll a boulder near a rock ledge so I could jump on it to be high enough to boost onto the ledge. I kept dying from falling (we're talking maybe 12 feet, not hundreds of feet into a chasm), until finally, figuring the boulder wasn't close enough, I kept pushing and suddenly clipped onto the ledge.
There's a bit of exploration. Sometimes you find an audio log left behind by Russian scientists, or some geologic formation or alien architecture catches your eye. Mostly the surroundings are bleak rock formations, so it feels silly running around peeking into every nook looking for things to read. Though I apparently did enough of it to unlock an achievement, so, *shrugs*.
It's not as passive a game as Dear Esther by any stretch, but it's minimalist. There's not much on the planet except what you can interact with. When you finally catch up to the other person, you can't understand them, and the graphics aren't expressive enough for me to have any sense of what they feel about my presence. Are they annoyed by this guy in the clunky spacesuit? Suspicious? Happy to see someone? I don't know.
Likewise, there's no communicating with the other lifeforms, beyond what you extrapolate from how they try to kill you, and what the audio logs tell about what the Soviets got up to. I'm still confused what led my character to decide these were actually the same ones who built the device the Soviets used to get here. He's right, but I don't know what evidence he had at that point in the game to draw that conclusion from.
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