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| This man is the acting Mayor, and - let me be quite frank here - is an absolute stupid twat. |
Being a launch title can be a real boon – for AAA titles they can sell more or less 1:1 with the console, see huge business and stellar reviews and become legendary. Take Breath of the Wild, for example – that title literally sold Switches, it was such a flawless whopper.
Or, being a launch title can be cover for a developer releasing a decidedly tepid game knowing it’ll do decent business just because there’s less new stuff to choose from – the “initially small pond making a mediocre fish seem relatively bigger” ploy (Oh, hello, Godfall. Don’t feel compelled to hang around, or anything. Yes, off you pop to obscurity. Bye.).
But a launch title given away for free? That’s either got to be one heck of an intro experience to a new system that the manufacturer feels everyone should enjoy without an entry fee (like Astro’s Playroom on the PS5, which is an utter delight), or it’s an absolute honking bin fire of clunk that in any other scenario would slide straight off people’s radars like a buttered fried egg from a platter made of ball bearings.
And with that greasy thought in mind, welcome to Bugsnax. Free with a PSN subscription for PS5 owners, and yet somehow so guff-filled it still seems overpriced.
News of the Weird
Bugsnax is, in brief, 1/3rd of a sub-par Pokemon game clumsily sellotaped onto a second-string daytime soap opera populated entirely by muppet rip-offs, that towards the end drunkenly veers off into a ditch. You play a journalist, apparently, sent to investigate the disappearance of a questionable explorer who has allegedly found an island full of strange but cute little creatures – half junk food, half animal. It’s your job to talk to the other inhabitants of the island to piece together what happened. That is, if you can somehow muster the energy to care.
What then follows is a series of tedious, repetitive quests where you do multiple fetch tasks for each member of the island’s community – who, I should mention have personalities that range all the way from “really quite annoying” to “outright shitbag” – to encourage them to move back to the island’s main town, at which point they’ll give you some sort of clue that furthers the main plot after you interview them. These interviews being entirely linear affairs – you just click through a fixed sequence of Qs and As, and there’s no actual skill in “questioning” to extract useful info, nor is anything you’re told in the interviews themselves (a) of any use other than as background to characters you probably don’t give a toss about anyway, or (b) related in any way whatsoever to what clue you get.
Poke-your-mum
But hey, surely the “gotta catch ‘em all” factor makes it fun? Well, here’s where we hit Bugsnax’s first big problem. The vast majority of the tasks you do are indeed “find and catch a certain type of bugsnack, and feed it to me”. Which would be fine, but you rapidly realise that aside from cosmetics, catching and feeding people different snax does nothing. There’s no imparting of special abilities or logic to what each person wants most of the time, it’s just an excuse to make you have to catch a new creature – and the bugsnax are also boringly similar. They either hide, or are aggressive, or are in an awkward area, or some combination of all three. But very, very few do anything unique, and once you’ve seen a handful the novelty rapidly wears off.
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| Be thankful this isn't a video review, because christ alive this character's singing is annoying. |
When you do feed people snax, all that actually happens is each creature consumed can replace a body part of who you feed it to, so the characters look increasingly stupid as the game progresses and they get kebabs for wrists and gherkins for genitals (noses). If creating a gallery of charmless freaks is your thing then this may have some appeal, but outside of a couple of obscure PSN trophies there’s no need to feed anyone anything outside of what’s needed to complete quests.
Disturbingly, one secret trophy requires you to feed snax to the character who lovingly keeps them as pets and doesn’t eat them, and to get round his morals you have to feed him while he’s sleepwalking. He then wakes up and freaks out, because OF COURSE HE WOULD AS THIS IS REALLY CREEPY BEHAVIOUR. But afterwards he immediately forgets this and treats you like a friend exactly the same as before, because – and here you may sense a theme developing – nothing in this game makes coherent sense.
Double licker
The exception to the changes not being meaningful is when the game implies a body change is needed, but this is solely in the sense of gating quest progress. For example, the unpleasant salesman guy wants ice lollies for feet to walk across the hot desert. So you have to do quests to unlock the snowy area, then catch and feed him ice lolly bugsnax, and change his feet. But it’s just ticking a box off a list – it doesn’t actually alter the gameplay in any way, no other character including you is affected by the desert heat, and he just leaves the desert and never goes back, and it’s never mentioned again.
By the way, your character can’t eat the bugsnax (this is established early on in a throwaway plot point), so where there was blatant scope for the game to let YOU do stuff like access hot areas after eating cold snax or vice versa, or be able to smash rocks after eating beefy snax, this is entirely squandered. This whole thing is an absolute waste of an obvious slam dunk of a gameplay mechanic with huge potential, and I can’t fathom why it wasn’t made any use of. It’s a bewildering omission.
Catching the various bugsnax is also a chore that only becomes more tiresome over time, as the game makes it deliberately more awkward to do so not by making snax more cunning and unique but just by putting in awkwardness obstacles and red herrings. In one part, you’re asked to catch a cinnamon bun snail, and there is one right next to you on an outcrop – indeed, the character you’re talking to directly refers to it. But that particular example of that kind of Bugsnax is incredibly tricky to catch in the game because of where it is placed, and what you should actually do is go to another area and catch a far more easily accessible one.
It’s a deliberate misdirection for no reason other than to annoy and be a barrier to progress – you could spend ages trying to suss it out because it’s implied you should catch that specific one, when you can just grab one round the corner in minutes. It’s a complete “fuck you” moment to players, and I have no idea why they did it.
A bad workman blames his tools, or something...
Talking of catching stuff, your equipment – a snare trap, springloaded platform, tripwire, grapple etc., is without exception clumsy and unintuitive to use, often needing you to do absurd juggling like firing the trap awkwardly into the air using the spring, then rapidly swapping in the radial menu to be able to activate the trap midair to catch flying snax. This, assuming your trap doesn’t fall over first, or a nearby aggressive snak you didn’t see doesn’t butt you out of the way, or set fire to your trap (or you). And ultimately you can only carry 8 snax anyway, so inventory management is a massive pain in the arse even when you do catch stuff. There's no repository to store snax either, so you'll sometimes have to release snax when catching new ones only to find you needed one you let go for a later quest - thus encouraging you not to bother catching any if you don't absolutely need them, which doesn't really make completing your collection very appealing.
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| Get orf my laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand!!! (And doubtless go and do a boring quest for me) |
If you like to make your weekly shop a challenge by doing it on a unicycle with a carrier bag that only has 1 handle, this might be the sort of tricky task you love. For the rest of us who aren’t having the time of their life laying sprawled and bleeding in the road surrounded by dropped yoghurts and dented bean tins, it just smacks of poorly tested game design.
So it’s an awkward game to play, with boring tasks and wasted gameplay opportunities. But does the plot rescue it?
In short, no. And in long, also no but with more words – the plot is a terrible fit for what the game seems to imply it is, veers from toilet humour to uneasy ignoring of the fact you’re eating cute creatures, and relies on charmless characters who make absolutely no sense as characters to carry it, which they unsurprisingly fail to do.
For example, the bodybuilding US teen jock dude is in an implausible gay relationship with the prickly, middle-aged unlikeable conspiracy theorist. And just to be clear, it’s not the gay bit that’s implausible – it’s the fact that these two people have absolutely no chemistry as written for any sort of relationship to be believable, let alone an intimate one. They don’t even hang out together much, but are just presented as caring about each other and having a history because “reasons”. Similarly, the farmer guy and his archaeologist wife can’t seem to stand each other, then do, then don’t again, the horrible mean gossip girl would clearly be hated by everyone, the loathsomely irritating singer inexplicably has the hots for the wet blanket pet guy yet also wants to eat his pets even though she knows what they mean to him, and I can barely bring myself to be arsed to type anything about anyone else.
Toilet puzzle frankenstein incident
They’re all devoid of endearing features, but more importantly what the hell are fuzzy muppet types and quirky fun snack animals doing in a game where you have to (ham-fistedly) repair failing relationships, spy on people like a paparazzi and investigate what’s slowly revealed to be an increasingly weird body horror plot in the first place? I mean, what the ruddy hell were the developers thinking of?
The game is a baffling mess of mismatched, half-baked ideas. On the one hand it looks like it should appeal to kids but is too frustrating for them to tolerate playing and the story might make them freak out (especially the ending), but on the other hand despite having a more “adult” plot than you might expect it’s too simplistic, not witty or interesting, and none of the characters are relatable.
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| Is supposed to be: a burger type thing. Looks like: a nappy full of coathooks. |
Bugsnax feels like it was another half-finished game – quite possibly a number of other half-finished games – but for whatever reason ended up the way it did after a series of disastrous script reviews and haphazard cut-and-shut game design. Sure, it’s different. Surprising, even. But it isn’t much fun, it isn’t very funny, it isn’t challenging in a skilful sense and it certainly doesn’t have a story you want to explore. It isn’t even technically impressive – loads of the bugsnax are reskins of each other, despite being a small game it has notable loading between areas, and visually it probably could have run on a PS3 let alone a PS4. It isn’t even a jack of all trades – it’s simply crap at everything it turns its mutated, freaky hand to.
Like a jigsaw made of bits of other jigsaws that have been soaking in a toilet. Avoid.
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