More Than a Meme: A Review of ‘Bugsnax’
The video game industry is often justifiably critiqued for producing safe, iterative games that adhere to a commercially successful formula. Bugsnax appeared this summer as the antithesis to that formula, an ingenuitive presentation that was lighthearted and wholesome unlike any of its peers in mainstream gaming spaces. From the wacky creature designs to the catchy trailer song from Kero Kero Bonito, I knew I would want to play Bugsnax the moment it was released.
But after a dozen or so hours with the titular bugsnax – creatures that are part bug, part snak, which serve as Pokemon-like collectables – I found that they unfortunately don’t amount to much in the scope of the narrative that the game wants to tell. And while Bugsnax’s announcement achieved larger-than-expected levels of success for the game, I think the overall game falls short of the hype. Though the game is still worth your time, Bugsnax never quite earns its place within the lexicon of memorable games that evolve from launch titles into must-play classics.
Gotta Catch ’em All
Bugsnax tells the tale of your playable character, a prominent journalist, who visits Snaktooth island to investigate the newly documented phenomena of bugsnax. As a journalist, your supervisor expresses some severe doubts and skepticism about the value of your journey, but you make your Grumpus way over to the island nonetheless. In a freak accident involving a bugsnak colliding into your aircraft, abandoning you on this prospective island, your character is knocked unconscious to the ground on Snaktooth, setting up the context for the ensuing gameplay: exploring and catching bugsnax.
To suggest that the bugsnax are, in some ways, not the focus of the game does not mean that they are insignificant or downplayed. The 100 potential catchable snaks you encounter are regionally locked, with some snaks pacing through lava or ocean, some snaks hiding in caves or bushes, waiting to be trapped. Each physical location is relegated to a climatic zone of some variety, e.g. Sugarpine Woods or Frosted Peak. which contain local varieties of bugsnax – some of which are entirely fresh designs, others of which are remixes of existing varieties. Almost all of the gameplay does, in fact, revolve around you strategically capturing a number of these species. But very little of the story is actually about that capture.
Evaluating Bugsnax‘s Story
The story of Bugsnax is relatively straightforward, with your journalist character playing the role of your average Ash Ketchum as each area is picked clean of new snak varieties. What makes the game intriguing, however, rarely has anything to do with the snaks but instead is to be found with the characters and interpersonal relationships. In a way that I couldn’t help but compare to Mutazione throughout, the characters in Snakburg – the island’s central town – play out a kind of soap opera that dramatically unfolds throughout the game.
This soap opera island story comprises the spectrum of human emotions, from social anxiety to overly-inflated egos. It’s difficult to suggest that Bugsnax has some of the most compelling characters of games released in 2020, but it’s nonetheless farcically easy to conclude that the themes addressed by the characters in Bugsnax are meaningful in a way that transcends the family-friendly nature of the game’s aesthetic presentation. These themes will connect with almost anyone who plays Bugsnax, whether they are seeking this emotional connection or not.
I think the most meaningful thing that Bugsnax unexpectedly did for me was its respectful and casual portrayal of queer relationships, something that perhaps didn’t “need” to happen, but was fulfilling to see. I imagine children playing this game and seeing neutrally presented queer characters for the first time and it makes me smile, wishing for an era of positive role-models that didn’t exist when I was a kid. Every relationship, queer or otherwise, was a useful demonstration of the ways that human intimacy can come under scrutiny – and for video games, those models are useful and important.
Mechanically speaking, Bugsnax is rarely a difficult game. With a simplistic wheel of options to engage the world, tools ranging from a simple net trap to a grappling hook, the world of Bugsnax is surprisingly accessible and uncomplicated. As the game progresses, and as you unlock additional snak-catching tools, the environmental puzzles increase in complexity and difficulty. But by and large, I found myself predominantly intuiting each puzzle within a few odd seconds instead of bashing my head into a wall repeatedly for minutes or hours at a time. The level and puzzle design of Bugsnax, from catching snaks to simply figuring out how to progress, was a delight throughout.
So Many Puns
All bugsnax have some degree of pun-inspired name and behaviors that reflect their food varieties. Some of my favorite snaks involve Bungers, which are half-wrapped hamburgers, Cheepoofs, which are moth-like flying Cheeto-puffs, and Crapples, which are crabs composed of apple slices. And of course there’s your odd Mountain Dew can that has an off-brand name. Each snak is delightfully crafted, from the Cinnasnail to the Weenyworm, and the primary enjoyment of my time on Snaktooth Island was found in discovering the biodiversity of this quirky evolutionary land.
The highlight of the game, however, is not the snaks, but the villagers who must be recruited back to Snakburg. The game’s thirteen Grumpuses (characters) are tied to the environments in which you encounter them. As you complete each area, catching and delivering various snaks, you will earn the trust and reassurance of these various characters, learning more about their personal lives and encouraging them to return to the village itself.
Unexpectedly Meaningful Relationships
As the game progresses, it becomes clear that the whimsical pretense for Bugsnax – catching these cute Pokemon-like creatures – is just that: a pretense. What becomes the focus towards the middle and end of the game is the relationships, complex enough to be humanlike in consequence, that underscore the need to find psychological support in communities. Each character in Bugsnax has a lesson to teach, a story to tell, and a life to be understood. For a game that on the surface looks like a cousin of Teletubbies, I was surprised with how much depth Bugsnax offered for its core cast of competent characters.
The gameplay ranges from simply timing catches of snaks to elaborate physics-based puzzles which involve multiple snak-catching apparatuses operating in concert with each other. As someone who abhors difficulty and complexity in games, I was delighted to find myself enjoying even the most intricate of snak-catching puzzles. Whether sending a snak-trap across a canyon-like gap or calculating the distance between trees for a trip wire, I always enjoyed the basic complexities of catching snaks.
How the Charm of Bugsnax Wears Off
One of the major contentions I think many people will share with my experience of the game is the amount of backtracking that the game requires. With fewer than ten major areas to explore, none of which are overly large, it wouldn’t seem like Bugsnax would commit the same sins as its open-world peers. However, I had to return multiple times to areas that were not only inconvenient to return to, but positively boring to engage with – just to advance a side story or make a character satisfied with me. Especially towards the end of the roughly ten-hour runtime of the game, I found myself determined to avoid certain side quests because of the requisite backtracking involved.
The gameplay of Bugsnax does little to prevent this sense of tedium and annoyance with backtracking, either. By the halfway point, I noticed that the charm of Bugsnax had worn off a bit and that I was not as eager to explore as I was at the outset. At some point, the mechanical “sameness” of exploration, snak-catching, and fetch-questing got to me. I was no longer enamored with the game, though I was never failing to have fun, and instead I was rotely going through the motions, mechanically and unthinkingly.
What Works and What Doesn’t
I don’t think Bugsnax fell short of its ambition, nor do I think it failed on any significant front. It might overstay its welcome by about one to two hours towards the end, it might benefit from one or two more gameplay mechanics or environments, and it might fail to convey the sense of adventure and optimism captured in the initial few trailers of the game’s announcement. But what Bugsnax does deliver on – the cute and whimsical creatures, the open and failure-free environments, and the puzzles that never feel like a skill check – is excellent.
While Bugsnax isn’t a transcendent indie that will inspire generations of future narrative-based titles in the way that Journey or Gone Home did, it will satisfy people who enjoy traditional experiences like Pokemon and its inspirational incarnations like Temtem. Reminiscent of eras past when 3D platformers with cartoon aesthetics dominated the all-ages demographic of games, Bugsnax fits a niche that felt nostalgic to me – despite its currency. As a premise – a weird island that half-bug, half-snaks inhabit – it’s one of the best-delivered game premises that 2020 has to offer. As a memorable game, however, it falls short of its ambition just often enough to doubt whether Bugsnax will continue to populate people’s memories in the future.
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