I first came across Planetiles when I was trawling the release schedule for last month’s best new roguelikes update, and I was instantly drawn the patchwork aesthetic and the overall premise of dropping blocks to grow a planet. After playing MythicOwl’s puzzler for several hours, I have to say I’m still very much enamoured with the game, despite one or two flaws that hold it back just a little.
Planetiles and its puzzling premise
The aim of the game is rather simple: you must fill grids with various Tetris-like blocks to score points. These grids are mapped across planets, and the tiles that you lay are different types of land. The more connections you make, and the smarter your placements, the more points you score. As I mentioned up top: it’s nice and simple.
I love board games, and while there is a roguish element at play here, for me, Planetiles feels like an elaborate tile placement board game. A recent favourite of mine is Cascadia, a tabletop game all about building harmonious biomes in North America. I’ve also played a ton of Kingdomino with my childerwinks over the years.
Like the aforementioned board games, Planetiles is all about careful tile placement. You’re given one tile – or chunk – to place at any given moment and you must connect what you’ve got in hand in the most efficient way to what’s already on the board. Building a square grid at least 3×3 of the same tile type and you’ll get a bonus building that grants benefits down the line. The aim of the game is slightly different each time, but ultimately you’re trying to position your tiles as effectively as possible, leaving as few gaps as possible.
You’ll (nearly) always take the weather with you
What stops Planetiles from feeling like a board game are the events that are inflicted on you whenever you level up, and the shifting objectives that you must fulfil.
On the left of the screen are any helpful bonuses that you’ve unlocked from your clever placement of chunks, and on the right are your objectives. These are as simple as building out clusters of matching tiles, or surrounding a number of tiles with different ones. Ticking off objectives is the quickest route to points, and earning points will eventually give you new abilities. However, these boons are always accompanied by negative effects.
These negative effects are things such as mountain ranges that erupt out of the ground, solar flares that render your boons inactive for a while, or a timer that forces you to place your tiles or lose them. You can run out of chunks after a while, but completing objectives and scoring points by connecting your biomes – forest to forest, field to field, and so on – will top up your supply and keep you playing.
You can choose to skip an ability and its conjoined negative effect, but where’s the fun in that?! As I alluded to in the sub-header: you’ll likely want the bonuses, even if it means a volcano pops up on the map somewhere. The further you get into the game, the more these bonuses will help you, as you can swap out blocks for new ones or refresh your objectives to something better suited to your build.
I love it when a Planetiles comes together…
When it works, it works really well. Planetiles offers a relaxing experience and for the majority of my time with the game, I was having a blast. There were, however, one or two wrinkles that hindered my enjoyment of it just a smidge.
The main problem was a lack of clarity in some of the descriptions. Even the main mechanics aren’t brilliantly explained, and it took me longer than I liked to fully understand the game’s essential mechanics. There’s work to be done on this front, but honestly I think it’s probably a relatively quick fix in the grand scheme of things.
I did like how the post-game data was presented to the player, and there are primary and secondary objectives to keep you busy. You’re also working towards an overall score for each new level, and there’s definitely replayability built in. However, there does feel like there’s room for this to grow via the addition of new content.
My complaints are surface level, and the main event is, in my opinion, very well done. I love the art style, the atmosphere, the premise, and most of all I love the back button, which allows you to undo one move – this has proved to be a most useful addition. Planetiles is a lovely, moderately priced roguish puzzle game, and if you like the sound of it based on the words above, I suggest you take this one out for a spin.
