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Bugsnax reviewWe’re talkin' about ‘em, alright.
We’re talkin’ about ‘em, alright.
In this weird adventure from the creators ofOctodad: Dadliest Catch, you play a journalist dispatched to a mysterious island in search of the legendary cryptozoologist Elizabert Megafig, only to discover that her expedition has gone off the rails. The fuzzy explorer is missing, presumed adorable, and the frontier village she established has been abandoned to ruin. The colourful cast of friendly muppets who joined Elizabert on her mission have each fallen into their own personal brand of despondency, scattering themselves across the map and refusing to return to town until someone, anyone, performs a series of snack-related tasks for them.
Watch on YouTube
Watch on YouTube
But despite the promise of an interdependent matrix of elemental sauces, capturing bugsnax is not as varied or systemic as it first seems. Ape Escape — 1999’s monkey-catching PS1 classic — turns out to be the best point of comparison here. Each bugsnax robotically follows a prescribed route when undisturbed, which can be revealed and highlighted using the camera, giving the handful of biomes the feel of a carefully constructed theme park ride, rather than anything as unpredictable as an organic and emergent ecosystem of flying sandwiches preying on sentient burritos.
Bugsnax never quite manages to marry this aspect of the game with the part where you’re lurking near a bush, using launchpads to trap a bunch of grapes that’s also a mosquito. There are certain features that feel half-finished or not fully developed. You can feed your captured snacks to the Grumpuses to transmute their limbs and facial features into various bits of strawberries, pineapple slices and calamari, customising their appearance to suit whatever particular preferences you might have. But you’re prohibited from ever eating the bugsnax yourself, an inexplicable design choice for a game that’sthismuch about food, and one that leaves you feeling like a sad spectator to the whole ordeal, a street urchin pressed up against the window pane of a Victorian sweet shop.
For the five or six hours it takes to reach the game’s ending, Bugsnax is a delightful and intriguing world to inhabit, just one whose robotic wildlife won’t inspire you to jump back in and finish off your collection. Bugsnax is a faintly naughty, but never crass adventure that feels simultaneously like a love letter to, and a sharply observed satire of, the games that inspired it.
