Bionic Bay Review

Bionic Bay is a single-player action platformer developed by Psychoflow and Mureena and published by Kepler Interactive (which total to… three people). I actually did a preview of Bionic Bay back in March, and I was stunned by just how fun it was. I even recommended playing the demo before reading the article; I was that impressed. But now it is ready for the full release, and I am eager to say this physics-based atmospheric platformer is even more amazing than what it showed in its little slice. So, what will it take me to convince you to pick this game up?

A lab accident has transported you, a lowly scientist, into a deadly mechanical world filled with fantastic devices and unique deathtraps. With nothing to do but go forward, hopefully you’ll find someone else still alive while finding a way home. Meanwhile, a robot seems to be exploring the world for some reason, working towards something that is left a mystery to you.

The story is pretty low-key for the most part. Whatever details you can gather will be from the corpses of those leaving behind their final words and the world design itself. There will be long stretches of nothing before you stumble upon more information. I found myself at least questioning what the heck was going on the entire time. Who created this place and for what purpose? Why is everything trying to kill me? How long has this been going on? What was the cause of the accident? Was it an accident? Even after playing through the entire story, I still have some questions, but I found myself enjoying what was there.

What really hooked me was the presentation: while the characters do have a distinct pixel art style, the rest of the game is distinctly not unless you take a really close look at it. The environments look more like art pieces or concept art for landscapes than actual playable levels. Its use of colour and lighting create awe-inspiring sights that wore down my screenshot button. While mostly being lifeless, oppressive, and dark, it combines with other aspects that will leave you just sitting there staring at some places. I also think the music is very well used here. Most of the game will be spent in silence other than the groans of metal and you dying hilariously fast. When it does come in to heighten tension or leave you with a sense of lament and loneliness, it does work wonders.

That being said, pretty landscapes alone don't sell copies, so let's get into the gameplay. You’ll be running and jumping through these wonderfully haunting levels, trying to make it to the end in one piece. Movement is smooth, making it feel natural to jump, roll, and dive everywhere you go. Thanks to becoming elastic or having a mechanical body, you can survive jumps from some fairly high heights. That’s not to say there isn’t any fall damage, though, as a big enough fall will break every bone in your body with a sickening crunch, but once you get a flow going, it feels really good. It makes me feel like a speedrunner, but your legs aren’t the only thing you’ll have to survive.

Throughout the campaign, you’ll be familiarising yourself with a variety of tools and abilities that will help you navigate the levels, such as a gadget that you can attach to objects and swap places with, explosive punches, glasses that can slow down time, and a hover pack that can change gravity. They’re simple on the surface, but you can get really creative with them, especially when combined together. Riding crates across chasms, shifting gravity at the last second to make a fall non-lethal, or jumping head first into a minefield and setting it off safely by swapping with an object are only some of the things you’ll learn to do on a frequent basis. Practically every level introduces something new, like a new mechanic or technique to use, so you’ll be getting a lot out of your abilities. It’s very fun figuring it out or performing something unintentionally, progressing despite it.

At some points, it feels more like a puzzle than a platforming challenge where you’re trying to figure out what needs to be done to get past an obstacle. Don’t worry about getting lost; despite how big the levels can seem, their designs and the camera do a good job of keeping you moving forward, even if you can’t tell what’s up or down. There was one point where I was stuck for a while, but that was due to my own stupidity.

This is enforced by the fact practically everything is trying to kill you. Turrets, homing rockets, bottomless pits, living puppy-like balls of fire, lasers, freezers, debris, explosives, just… a whole lot of stuff that will make you dead in seconds. These deaths can be surprisingly brutal for a character who is only 32 pixels high. Working out how to best avoid death, sometimes at high speed while giant balls of murder are rolling towards you, is a good learning experience. Thankfully, checkpoints are frequent, never losing more than a minute of progress and getting you back into it in only a few seconds at most. No matter how many times I failed, I never felt frustrated at any point, and I am not that good at platformers.

For the competitive types, there’s an Online mode where you can race against other people’s ghosts for the fastest time. The levels featured in this mode are more challenging than the ones in single-player, so you’ll need a good understanding of the game to stand a chance. Actually, it’s locked off until you complete 10 levels of the campaign. I said it before in my preview, but I really hope to see Bionic Bay in a Games Done Quick event.

However, in order to be a good speedrun game, it actually has to run well. Thankfully, despite vast environments, amazing lighting, and huge amounts of explosions and physics objects hurtling toward your face, Bionic Bay runs as smooth as butter. No frame drops from 60 FPS, load times are only a couple of seconds, and I didn’t notice any glitches or bugs in my time with the game. My playthrough took about nine hours, including all my deaths and some time on the Online mode. It’s not a long time, but I feel it’s the right amount for a game like this. It doesn’t overstay its welcome once you’ve grown used to the mechanics.

Bionic Bay is amazing. Plain and simple. It’s a game filled with passion and beauty in its brutal, unrelenting world, and has plenty to do after you’ve beaten its short campaign for the most determined of players. Go pick this up, because it deserves a lot of love.