f13.net forums - Bugsnax - Young Horses

I watched a lot of horror at what many would consider a much too young age and 99% of it didn’t leave any long-term mental scars. I do have to admit to at least a small amount of kindertrauma though. Thanks to seeing Cujo at the drive-in when I was 4 years old I was not a fan of dogs for a long time growing up. Another memory seared into my brain from an early age was the Tales from the Darkside episode “Love Hungry”. In it, a woman struggling at weight loss receives glasses and a hearing aid that cause her to perceive all food as being alive. At a restaurant food screams in pain as diners cut into it. The fruit in her apartment begs not to be eaten. I’m not going to suggest that this episode had anything to do with my general dislike of anthropomorphic food, or eventually becoming a vegetarian, but clearly this shit stuck with me.

So it was, I honestly had trouble proceeding through the first couple hours of Bugsnax. The premise of the game is fairly horrific at first blush. This is an island filled with food that is alive. A lot of the Bugsnax have cute googly eyes. They say their names in what I’m sure is partially intended as a similarity to Pokémon, but in the context of this game feels like the notion of saying your name when being abducted to remind your captor of your humanity. When they get eaten by a Grumpus (the humanoid race the main character and surrounding cast are a part of), they are swallowed alive and whole. Only one Grumpus doesn’t partake of the Bugsnax, and he keeps them as pets he refers to as kin. He has even placed a Strabby (strawberry with googly eyes) inside something like a hamster ball and trains it to run obstacle courses. This created another level of distaste for me when the plot requires feeding Bugsnax to people to progress.

While I could appreciate what the writers were doing, I honestly wasn’t sure I was going to be able to make it through this game at first. Reading some spoilers and seeing where they were going with it helped and I was eventually able to push all the way through it to the point of getting a platinum trophy. I’m going to talk about the gameplay briefly here. It’s fine. It’s almost entirely puzzle solving, requiring the player to figure out how to catch each Bugsnax. There’s a lot of repetition involved and there’s very little that’s going to tax anyone’s brain here. There may be a handful of times where it will take you longer than 1-5 minutes to figure out how to capture any given Bugsnax and there’s nothing that felt particularly clever. It’s not the reason to play this game.

I’ve likened the story to Cronenberg attempting to write a sincere children’s story without realizing that he’s actually created something more horrific than his previous work. The cuteness of this game not only makes the devouring of Bugsnax all the more horrific to me, but the body horror of the Grumpus body parts being replaced by the shapes of the Bugsnax they’ve eaten is just fucking disturbing at first. It shown in the trailers so people are generally going into this game knowing what they’re getting into, but being an active participant in it all made it so much worse to me. The plot starts off as a mystery but as things develop, not surprisingly the pieces you start putting together suggest not that not everything is as it seems.

Now I realize that all the body horror and food horror stuff is almost tailor-made to push my buttons and probably nobody else’s here, so here is the main selling point for anybody not me: I think the writers actually did a really good job with these characters. The first couple of characters you run into feel pretty stock early on. As you start to bring other Grumpuses back into town though and get to learn more about them though they feel more “real” than just about anyone from The Last of Us 2 or similar games. They have relatable insecurities, which a few of them try to deal with by trying to alter their bodies with Bugsnax. They have fleshed out relationships, two out of three of which are same-sex relationships. The dynamic between the jock and the scientist in particular is one of the sweetest relationships I’ve seen in a game and one line of dialogue between the two near the very end actually made me laugh out loud.

I have to wonder if the sole purpose of the art direction was to subvert expectations. Clearly this game is designed to look like a kid’s game, and it certainly plays like something all-ages as well. I wouldn’t say the writing is inappropriate for kids but neither is it something I think would generally appeal to very young kids especially. I have no idea who the target audience for this game actually is. I haven’t read any interviews from the developers, and don’t know anything about them. Part of me is curious what exactly was the thought process here in making this game, and part of me would like keep it a baffling mystery. Regardless, I’ll probably pick up whatever these folks release next and maybe go back and play Octodad: Deadliest Catch as well. Buxsnax is flawed as hell, but nobody else is doing anything like this.