E.T. meets Short Circuit. That’s what comes to mind whenever I see the game Phoning Home, a title that’s prepping for release next month on February 7th for PC.

The game follows to small robots, ION and ANI, who get trapped on a planet and must find a way to phone home. The game takes place in an open world and it’s up to ION to keep ANI safe from environmental hazards, harsh weather conditions and other obstacles that stand in their way.

Ion Lands unleashed the launch trailer for Phoning Home featuring a quick overview of the story, characters and the gameplay for the 3D action-adventure game.

Phoning Home sees players taking on enemies, teleporting around to avoid platforming conundrums, and avoiding certain dangers.

The title definitely has a certain old-school charm to it. It reminds me of the old action-adventure games on PC that came out during the latter half of the 1990s, when 3D games started to become the norm and a lot of developers went wild with all sorts of crazy-cool concepts and designs that explored their creative limits. It’s a real shame that these days creative games are a real rarity and most times – like in the case with Phoning Home – said creativity is usually coming out of an indie studio and not a major studio, which is the complete opposite of what it was like back in the 1990s.

Anyway, a lot of gamers are actually thoroughly interested in Phoning Home and liken it to Pixar’s Wall-E. It’s easy to see the similarities between ION and ANI, and Wall-E and Eve.

Phoning Home hasn’t received a whole lot of coverage leading up to its release, so we’ll see how well it fares on the Steam store. Usually games with an interesting but emergent hook to them take off pretty quickly on Steam, so there’s a good chance the game might find a good home amongst sci-fi fans looking for a story-driven adventure.

You can check out Phoning Home‘s Steam page right now or wait for February 7th to roll around and pick up a digital copy if the game seems like something worth adding to your library.