Perhaps you've seen the trailer for the latest version of Doom. It's what you'd expect from a first-person shooter: loud and bloody, with screaming metal guitar riffs and lots of testosterone. Now take a look at a shooter that's downright adorable: Lovely Planet: Arcade.
Developer Vidhvat Madan, aka Quick Tequila, calls it a "back-to-basics shooter," and it is made with all the constraint and simplicity of the oldest games of the genre, with the original Doom particularly in mind. But instead of aliens and gore, it has sunshine and rainbows.
I caught a glimpse of Lovely Planet, coming later this year on PC, at the PAX South expo last month and was drawn in by the sheer silliness of the bright and colorful style. Madan emphasized the classic lineage of the game. Playing off of the design constraints of the earliest shooters, Lovely Planet: Arcade doesn't let you look up and down. Instead, armed with a simple, and slow, pop gun, you can shoot only what's right in front of you.
Arcade is a sequel to Lovely Planet, a shooter that arrived last year and Madan describes as "complicated."
"It was a proper FPS; you could look everywhere, you could shoot everything," he said. "It had its own charm to it, but I wanted to do something different, so I was like, let's take it back to where it was before the FPS came into form."
The gameplay is pure throwback: fast and simple, a matter of dodging slow projectiles while firing your own. The enemies resemble paper snowmen or simple, cartoonish representations of kokeshi dolls. The small stages look like something made with an elementary school class's art supplies. Floating hearts decorate the ground like shrubs.
"The art style was influenced by Japanese culture," Madan said. "What I like about it is that it's in complete contrast to the gameplay. The gameplay is hard, it's time-based, you make a mistake if you're pushed back. The visuals and the music, it's cute and welcoming and you want to see it."
The colorful aesthetic gives the old gameplay an entirely new feel. Instead of the apprehension and dread of drooling alien monsters, it feels cheerful and playful, like a game of dodgeball with friends.
It also feels a little transgressive. First-person shooters have long been a bastion of gaming's boys' club, with a strong legacy of emphasizing masculinity and typically male-centric aesthetics in both presentation and mechanics. In that context, cute isn't just a contrast; it's subversive. It recalls, subtly, the work of Rachel Weil, whose Hello Kitty Land hack replaces the sprites of Super Mario Bros. with Hello Kitty and friends, recasting gaming history in a feminist light.
By reframing old gameplay with an aesthetic style that avoids the hypermasculinity that often comes with it, Lovely Planet: Arcade likewise comments on, and rethinks, a piece of gaming's past. Not that Madan necessarily intends to make a statement with Lovely Planet: Arcade. Playing the game, its ambitions seem fairly simple. It wants to be graceful, and challenging, and joyous. Based on what I've seen so far, it will succeed.
