Planet s all is a science fiction all-text adventure in which you are an Ensign 7th Class of the Stellar Patrol. You soon find yourself marooned on a planet, uninhabited except for a robot named Floyd. Other than wanting to get back to your Galactic Union, the game's purpose isn't clear until much later, when a computer within your computer provides some much needed detail on various aspects of your newly found world. Along the way, you will find four subsystems to repair, and disease, hunger, and radiation poisoning to overcome before one of the alternative endings makes everything clear. The different endings may indicate that you failed to do something necessary to achieve the optimum solution.

The puzzles are generally clever, but not quite as interactive as other Infocom games. There are several "choke points," particularly early on in the game, that block alternative actions until they have been solved. The vocabulary is quite good, as one expects from Infocom, although it seems that an excess of typing is required at times just to prove the point that the game has a multiple word parser. In some regards, the parser seems restrictive and unnecessary for precise syntax.

Planetfall isn't quite as tight a game as its predecessors; there are numerous rooms in this game that are just window dressing, in which nothing pertinent to the game can be accomplished or learned. To "complement" this, there are a number of red herrings, which, with one exception, are not developed enough to seriously mess you up. Inventory management may be a problem, as there are a plethora of objects to manipulate, many of which are irrelevant and have absolutely nothing to do with the few that are the keys to the game. The puzzle is to determine which is which.

Floyd is a pleasant enough character to have around as a traveling companion, but somehow he's not quite the same show stealer as are several of the robots in Suspended. All in all, Planetfall is an interesting adventure, suitable for both the novice and for the experienced player, but not quite in the same league as some of the other recent Infocom releases.