Bugsnax Review: Bad Vibes in Paradise

The only way I’ve been able to even come close to explaining the vibe of Bugsnax, the latest game from Octodad developer Young Horses, is: “What if Steve Irwin were in charge of the Fyre Festival?” Honestly the game is about as fun and put together as you’d expect from that description. 

Despite all the charm and friendliness the marketing for Bugsnax presented, the googly eyes and tropical setting,  it is not a friendly or charming game. From the outset, it becomes apparent that this game’s tone is drastically darker than what its trailers and gameplay had originally implied. You’re not some carefree tourist going on an adventure; you’re a washed up tabloid journalist whose only chance at keeping their job is to find a disgraced explorer and hope what she found on the mysterious island in her video isn’t a hoax. As you meet the rest of the game’s cast, it becomes apparent that this kind of dysfunction is par for the course. 

This in and of itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but the game doesn’t handle it well at all. Even though you find out things are going to be a bit more real than you were probably expecting, the game insists on maintaining its wacky veneer. The species all the characters are from are called Grumps (plural)/Grumpus (singular), and they have names like Wambus, Filbo, and Wiggle, and they all look like walrus-inspired, knockoff Muppets. Snaktooth Island is similar; its color palette is vibrant and both the environments and Bugsnax look like they’re 3D rendered origami. The Bugsnax themselves are depicted as being either timid, aggressive, or kind of dopey, and while their designs are largely clever, they don’t really fit with the ominous tone that becomes more and more obvious as the story progresses, especially once the final twist is revealed. Because the hints that something is amiss are layered on right from the start, it makes the fact that everyone has silly names and the vibrant atmosphere with cute critters feel like a Truman show background where you already know it’s a fake world. 

This insistence on leaning into the cute and harmless vibes also serves to undercut the very real struggles and issues the characters on the island are facing. There are both couples and siblings facing issues of trust, compatibility, and even scientific ethics, but most of this is just sort of hand-waved away at the end of short questlines where things are fixed through the power of love, or by simply not addressing the underlying issue at all. One character is depicted as having massive struggles with mental health and possibly addiction, and the story’s solution for that is basically she works out and gets tougher. Now, the game doesn’t really say that it’s a fix, it’s more just this character’s response to their illness, but once that character is found, there’s no more insight or explanation into her mental health or overall state. 

The main sin Bugsnax commits is introducing interesting ideas and then just sort of flubbing them less than halfway through. This applies heavily to the Bugsnax themselves, which serve no real purpose to gameplay other than being the object of fetch quests that get repetitive and old very quickly. Tiny spoilers: your character cannot eat Bugsnax in game, so there’s not even a way to experiment with their different effects on your own body. You can do it to other Grumps on the island though, and that’s the core gameplay loop. 

The thing is though, hunting Bugsnax isn’t fun. More often than not, it’s frustrating. Many of the Snax have different abilities or conditions that make it difficult to catch them with the standard trap you get upon arriving on Snaktooth Island. This can be a coating of ice that freezes anything the Snack touches, flames that can melt that ice, armor, etc. Figuring out how to utilize your tools, the environment, and the other Snax in the area seems fun in theory, but is janky at best in practice. The game often doesn’t explain what you’re actually supposed to do to grab a Snack, and while this does open possibilities on how to approach your hunt, it also gets extremely frustrating when the logical clues aren’t quite there. More often than not, my catches were the result of luck or a bit of cheesing, instead of doing what the game actually wanted me to (despite my best efforts). 

This unsatisfying loop leads into a slightly uncomfortable mechanic. You fetch whatever kind of Bugsnack a character is hungry for, they eat it, and you watch as their body changes to match what they ate. Relatively quickly, you get a device that allows you to decide which body part will be affected, and it feels weird at times. Once you’ve caught a Bugsnack, you open the required character’s Feed menu, select it, and then choose which limb will change. It’s fine when the Grumps specifically request you change a certain part of their body, but it’s weird to get that control over them every time you feed one, especially when you find out that the character who gave you the device to do it has a history of scientific malpractice and ethical violations. 

Most of the characters in this game are over the top in a way that makes them extremely unlikable. There’s the aforementioned unethical scientist–who is also nonbinary–and a gay inventor who’s also deep into Grumpinati conspiracy theories. There’s actually a solid amount of queer characters in the cast, five out of the twelve characters not counting the player. Most of them aren’t great people, but I’d be fine with that had their stories been given any room to breathe. Unfortunately they’re not, and the endings feel stunted and more childish than the rest of these characters’ stories. 

The main story also could have used a lot more room to breathe. At its core, Bugsnax is a story about shitheads and frauds who think they can manage a colony with disastrous results. While colonialism stories in games are often questionable at best, there could have at least been potential in the game’s ending. But instead it’s rushed, anticlimactic, and a boring take on body horror with a pain in the ass mini game thrown in for good measure. 

Getting into the more technical aspects of this game’s failings, I do think it’s important to note that it doesn’t run super well on the PS4 Slim, in my experience. I had some bad frame rates and glitching. 

Overall, Bugsnax is a game that is both weird and cute, but not better for either of those things. It’s the story of the worst people you know doing something stupid as you watch, but it strangles any of the nuance or interest that comes with such complex and flawed characters with forced wholesomeness and a boring and frustrating gameplay loop only makes the experience worse. I’ll say this though: the music is good.