OK, so I don’t gush a lot and usually it’s because whatever game I’m playing has top-tier waifus to fit every taste, but OMG Lifeless Planet.

The shtick is, you’re an astronaut who volunteered for a one-way trip to a newly discovered habitable planet, and you’ve been in cryosleep for 15 years to get there. Your lander crashes, you wake up with a damaged suit and the other members of your crew missing… oh, and the brilliant green planet you were expecting is a barren wasteland, devoid of all life barring a few exceptionally homicidal plants.

Then you find electrical lines in the middle of said wasteland, and they lead you to an abandoned Russian town that looks like a slice of 1950s Americana, with white picket fences and everything. That’s when your focus shifts from “how am I going to survive” to “how am I going to survive… and what the heck happened here?”

There’s no combat. Three things explode. You fall to your death a lot. There’s some phenomenal atmospheric music to accompany your frequent deaths.

I loaded it up just after midnight to “get a feel for it” with the plan of playing it when I got up in the morning, and I was up until 4 AM.

Available on PC and Mac; I played through it on the Mac and got roughly consistent 30fps at 1920×1080 on my integrated-graphics 2015 iMac so it does not need a lot of oomph.  If you do likewise and want to play with a controller, you’re going to be spending some time in the button assignments menu.  Presumably controller support on the PC is a little more plug and play.