Petit Planet – Hands-On Impressions from the Stardrift Test

When you hear about developer HoYoverse working on a new game, chances are you’d expect another high-quality RPG with gacha elements. After all, such are the studio’s most famous games: Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail, Zenless Zone Zero and the upcoming Varsapura and Honkai: Nexus Anima.

But HoYoverse took a different approach when it comes to Petit Planet that does not seem to utilize the traditional gacha elements. Instead, the game uses HoYoverse’s strengths and a combination of cozy sim elements to bring forth a relaxing, instantly familiar experience.

Petit Planet is currently going through the Stardrift Test, giving lucky players a chance to nurture their own little planet and meet a variety of unique but friendly neighbors. Grab your jar of Luca for your sapling, and let’s dive right in.

Petit Planet invites players to weave their dreams beneath the stars, and that includes getting a small, cozy planet of your own after a colorful intro and a brief character creation that features just what you’d expect: skin tone, eye shape, hairstyle, and clothes.

If you had ever wanted to feel like the Little Prince, now is your chance. But, you won’t have to go at it alone – a colorful cast of characters are more than happy to walk you through the starting experience and lend a paw or a witty remark.

First thing you’ll notice right away is HoYoverse’s unique touch when it comes to character design and animations. Your neighbors are positively bursting with personality, and the bouncy animations and colorful designs only add to their charm. All characters are voiced, although there are interactions that remain strictly as text.

If you have played other life sims like Animal Crossing or Palia, you know exactly how things are going to go. Your character, the newbie, visits their property and meets friendly neighbors who are going to help them to settle, serving as an in-game tutorial to gathering, fishing, mining, farming, decorating, cooking, and so on, and Petit Planet is no different, even if your property is an entire little planet.

However, the big difference in the early experience is that Petit Planet is set on tightly holding your hand through a lengthy period that can last as much as 2-3 hours. You cannot just run off and explore on your own since the game painstakingly takes you through every single feature you encounter by having the characters explain it through dialogues and mini-cutscenes.

Sure, you don’t have to immediately set off on doing the newest quest, but that also means you don’t have access to the full list of features and are limited to only very basic interactions with the environment and characters. Not to mention, your planet also changes and grows as you do the quests and water the Luca Arbor.

At the moment, if you do not complete the quest to gather plums, you can’t gather flowers. If you don’t gather flowers for another task, you can’t catch insects. If you don’t catch enough insects to turn them in, you can’t unlock fishing, blocking you from housing… and so it goes for a couple of hours.

Instead of running around and finding a piece of ore that you can’t mine yet because your skill is too low or you need different tools, or finding a blueprint that requires materials you don’t have yet that naturally funnels you in a certain direction, Petit Planet controls every step as you start playing and exploring. Such a rigid approach clashes with the very idea of a cozy life sim that is all about player freedom and expression and makes it feel like busywork.

Despite the somewhat rough start, the game starts picking up by the time you unlock the Footprints feature, Loomix market (the daily store with furniture and outfits) and crafting, giving you the real shot at customizing anything and everything you come across.

The entirety of the planet is your canvas: your character’s clothes, your house, your neighbors’ houses, the actual options that will change the look of the entire planet such as the meadows, and more. Suddenly, there’s also plenty to do: you can go around collecting, interacting with your neighbors, building, cooking, and more, all with a robust tracking system which lets you know exactly what you need and where to get it.

And, if something is unavailable on your own planet, then you grab your neighbors and set off on a Starsea Voyage across procedurally-generated planets. Note that this feature is limited by the car batteries, so you can’t spend all of your time pillaging.

If you are looking for company, you can hop into multiplayer hub, the Galactic Bazaar, to participate in a variety of events and mini-games. From time to time you will also see strangers’ planets drifting by peacefully.

It is easy to see one spending dozens of hours tweaking everything to perfection, meeting new characters, collecting everything you can get your hands on, and still wanting for more once Petit Planet hits its stride. Still, the game has to offer something beyond the aesthetics to keep players moving onward when the novelty wears out.

To sum it up, Petit Planet is a simple, cozy life sim that tries to be welcoming and friendly in every single bit of gameplay and sometimes goes overboard with it. If you can withstand the first couple hours of tightly controlled tutorial that will have you talk to everyone and water the tree every minute, the game gives you a wealth of content to enjoy and explore freely.

Petit Planet features a number of charming NPCs that will serve as your neighbors, bright and unique if overly verbose from time to time. Both the NPCs and the protagonist have the energetic, smooth, bouncy animations that HoYoverse is quite famous for in their other games. These fuzzy animals randomly crashing on your planet have a surprising amount of depths and story to them, more so than you’d expect from a cozy life sim in its second beta.

The mini-games and mechanics, meanwhile, are lacking in it. The way a mechanic is presented in the tutorial is exactly the way it will continue playing onward. Hours in, there were no challenges or trials or any kind of unusual activities that will require you to pay attention. The “hardest” would probably be crabs attempting to skulk away from you but reappearing a few steps away regardless.

At the moment, Petit Planet looks absolutely incredible but feels like it didn’t quite figure the balance in its gameplay. The younger audiences are unlikely to care about lengthy cutscenes and dialogues that prevent them from diving into gameplay head first, while older gamers might get bored with the simplicity of the game’s mechanics.

• Similar to: Animal Crossing, Palia