Conceptually, Bugsnax is a game that in many ways feels made especially for me. For one thing, it’s a spiritual successor to Pokemon that finally delivers some basic features which that series has never deigned to include. To catch a Bugsnak, you don’t just need to know where it lives. You often need to consider the world from its perspective. That’s right, semiotics fans: Bugsnax have Umwelten. Each species follows a simple set of navigation rules, avoids some things, seeks out others, and ignores everything else.
That’s ultimately just an application of basic game AI to animals, and while welcome, not especially remarkable. What’s more interesting is that in order to catch Bugsnax, you often need to consider them in the context of their ecosystem. Unlike Pokemon, Bugsnax interact with each other in the wild. To catch them, you need to ask questions like: How can I manipulate one Bugsnak into making another vulnerable to capture? How can I lure or scare one away from safety and deactivate its defenses? This kind of ecological problem-solving is in my opinion a far more interesting application of the skills of a Pokemon team. There’s just something inherently cool about such things in real life--dolphins driving schools of fish toward nets in Brazil; Chinese fishermen using trained cormorants; otter fishing in Bangladesh; ferrets for ratcatching; and, of course, falconry. Who wouldn’t rather do that than cock-fighting?
Unfortunately, this is not in fact how Bugsnax works. Once captured, they can’t be used for anything but food. Your task is not to build a team of creatures and apply their unique skills to capture other creatures. It’s to master the use of a set of tools to capture them directly yourself. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing on its own merits, but it causes the game to suffer from a mechanical identity crisis. The main “verb” of the gameplay is Thinking. You’re supposed to use the information provided to figure out which of your tools to apply and how. But in practice, that’s often a frustrating experience. Too many puzzles are either trivial repetitions of the tutorial scenarios or exercises in fighting slow movement speed and difficult tool controls.
There are some good, satisfying problems to solve in there, but they only flicker briefly into view between the tutorial and the boss fights. The weakness of the core gameplay becomes increasingly keen as the difficulty and stakes escalate. Each area has a climactic giant Bugsnak to capture, and to do so requires less problem solving and more repetition. It gave me a feeling I haven’t had as a gamer in a long time, maybe since I was a kid: that I’d stopped playing a game and started being subjected to tasks the developers had come up with to keep me busy. I’d figured out the solution, but it was arbitrarily difficult to achieve, and I had to do it again and again for no particular reason. Whenever you don’t have to think, the game is simply not fun to engage with, and unlike a puzzle game, the difficulty for thinking curves down as the game progresses.
This is disappointing, certainly, and it saps some of the energy from the experience, but the game doesn’t wear it poorly. There’s a clear sense that the aesthetic and narrative elements are meant to be the main selling point. That’s obviously the case for Pokemon too, and the mechanics here are no more tedious than those (well-loved) games. So how does it do on that front?
I don’t find the muppet-style character design and the candy-and-googly-eyes creatures particularly to my taste (which runs closer to the elegant grotesques of the Souls series), but I don’t have an objection to it either. Candy has a solid pedigree in weird fantasy worldbuilding, from Oz to Adventure Time, and this is another solid entry in that tradition. The story lets you know right away that there’s something weird going on here. It’s played off with a laugh and goofy presentation, but there’s a nagging body horror in feeding people and watching their bodies transform to match the meal.
I struggled a bit at times to get over the gimmicky nature of the cast, but there’s solid character work beneath that, and the game makes a real effort to bring out the dynamics between them in ways that play to some meaningful themes. There is at least more creativity and intentionality in the emotional beats motivating each sidequest than there is in the gameplay tasks associated with them. They’re conspicuously gay and generally pretty sweet; the conflict leans more to personal vulnerability than drama or conflict.
The climax heightens all these points--and I’m about to spoil it, fair warning.
Snaktooth Island is a living creature, and it survives by converting Grumpus biomass into parts of its Bugsnak body. This is entirely my shit. I love the idea of ecosystems acting as mega-organisms, I love parasites, and I especially love parasite manipulation. This game has all of that and more. It explains a lot of the limitations of the game’s ecology in a really cool and convincing way. The Bugsnax were easy to catch because they were trying to get caught. They look not just like food but like visually appealing snacks specifically because those are the things that prove most enticing to Grumpuses. They only put up a show of resistance to sell the illusion, like the dance of the fake spider on the tail of a horned viper. The idea that the island had evolved all of this fake ecology (and archaeology!) merely to lure in scholars, including me as a player, is wonderful.
What I dislike is that after the ruse is revealed, the island is reduced to an open and comprehensible antagonist. It deploys Bugsnax as waves of mindless drones, and you mindlessly destroy them. If the main verb in the game is to Think, the game is over when the finale starts. The gameplay in the final section is an even more cursory, insulting set of minigames than anything that came before, adding nothing to the story and delivering nothing of the core mode of play. It’s reductive and annoying both in gameplay and in the way it frames the cool idea that’s just been revealed.
I did enjoy the giant Bugsnak hybrid monster and the way it fits into the main character dynamic. There’s something gleeful about watching Lizbert deliver a heartfelt monologue about her sense of guilt and failure for leading her friends to be consumed by this parasitic island, about what it does for the legacy of her guidance as a leader and inspirational figure and friend and partner, all while she’s speaking as a sushi roll attached to a giant birthday cake spider with pizza wings.
So overall I appreciate it, and I’d broadly say I enjoyed it, despite an unshakeable sense of tedium and disappointment in certain aspects. I don’t know that I’d begrudge it $25, but it was certainly worth my time as a free PS Plus game.