Bugsnax (PS5)
Out in the ocean, on a small stretch of land called Snaktooth Island, there are creatures like you’ve never seen before. One part food, one part arthropod, and all bearing the same set of cute googly eyes, these unique little animals are known collectively as Bugsnax, and the mystery behind just what they are is what drives your reporter character to set off and explore the island.
Invited to the island by famed explorer Lizbert Megafig, your reporter character comes to the island full of Bugsnax and quickly finds things aren’t as chipper as they appeared in the invite. Lizbert is missing, the town full of people has been abandoned by all but the overly friendly doormat of a mayor Filbert, and there’s no way to get off of the island. Uncovering the reason behind Lizbert’s disappearance soon becomes a priority on top of learning more about the Bugsnax for your article, but to solve both mysteries involves tracking down the citizens of Snaxburg and reuniting them, the process of doing so unsurprisingly involving the very creatures you came to the island to study.
The Bugsnax consist of 100 unique creatures that all contain some mix of real world animal and food. For example, a Bunger is a burger beetle with a wrapper for a shell and curly fries to make it have the legs and horns needed to mimic a rhinoceros beetle. A pineapple turned tarantula, rack of ribs turned centipede, and a mosquito made out of a grape are other creatures you can expect to find in your travels, and some ideas like a burrito being made into an inchworm feel both clever yet natural. Bugsnax can be made of both food and packaging such the Noodler which is a bowl of soup with six chopstick legs and there’s a whole family of soda-based creatures who consist of a soft drink can with straws poking out to serve as legs. Admittedly, there are definitely some shortcuts taken in the design of these creatures, many featuring recolors to match they different flavors they’re available in. Finding a normal, white, and flamin’ hot variant of the cheese puff butterflies isn’t that interesting, and the four Peelbug variants all being just different types of fruit slices removes some of the joy from uncovering a technically new species.
The biomes you explore on Snaktooth Island like the beach, snowy mountain, and arid canyon do at least make sure to have a new batch of creatures whenever you enter a new zone despite the presence of some recolors. Most of the designs do lean towards a few basic ideas though, such as appending six spindly legs to a piece of food or even just slapping googly eyes on something like a piece of popcorn or egg yolk and considering that a new creature. Some Bugsnax do lean more into their arthropod heritage with the Picantis looking like a mantis made of Mexican cuisine and the Scorpepper being a fairly typical scorpion save for its pincers and tail barb being ghost peppers. Some boss creatures like the Mothza Supreme and Daddy Cakelegs manage to be imposing despite being a pizza moth and birthday cake daddy longlegs respectively, but the boss bugs are also the ones that have the most involved catching methods. Since the Bugsnax are often the solution to problems on Snaktooth Island, you’ll need to be able to capture them and carry them to the people you’re interviewing to complete their quests. As such, every Bugsnak isn’t just a rather cute design, it’s also a small challenge to figure out what you need to do to store them in your pack.
The basic trap is a fairly simple concept, the player throwing down a wooden snare they activate when a creature is in range. The Bugsnak will break free if you don’t grab it quickly enough, but outside of some fairly simple early game bugs, the trap alone won’t snag the creatures until you’ve performed some other action. Some Bugsnax react to different sauces and condiments, the player able to launch them with a slingshot to do things like lure creatures into your traps, trigger battles between Bugnax interested in the same sauces, or just outright disorient them if you’re using something strong like hot sauce. There are some other tools like a spring pad that can launch Bugsnax about and a ball with a strawberry bug inside that you’ve trained to follow a pointer so it can bully other bugs out of hiding, but Bugsnax’s catching complexity isn’t very deep to begin with and quickly becomes all about the tool known as the Trip Shot. The Trip Shot not only lets you set up a trip line between any two points you can place the bases, but it can even carry fire and other elements to bugs who might need some heat or cold to reduce their own dangerous elemental affiliation. The Trip Shot can be used to daze so many Bugsnax that it can be easy to forget you have other means of catching creatures, and while the boss fights still manage to be interesting due to them filling the battle area and often requiring multiple steps to overcome, the Trip Shot soon turns catching bugs into a simple task far earlier than you might expect from something so universally useful.
Luckily, even though the act of catching bugs starts to become a little less exciting once familiar designs and the Trip Shot become the norm, the cast of characters you meet on your adventure are actually well-written and have excellent voice acting. While the Bugsnax are the game’s big appeal, the people you meet on Snaktooth Island make the quests worth engaging with even when they’re often just about grabbing the right Bugsnax or heading somewhere at a specific time to snoop on other characters. The main characters in this world are a species known as Grumpuses, their designs looking pretty close to the kind of round and friendly Muppet monsters you’d find near the back of a picture of all the puppet characters on Sesame Street. Getting all the characters back to Snaxburg isn’t just about convincing them to come back, and as you meet more characters and they begin to interact with each other, you’ll learn that not only do these Grumpuses all have interesting histories with each other, but some have some rather delightful personalities. Wiggle is an over the top diva who is searching for inspiration from Bugsnax to help her overcome her curse of being a one-hit wonder, Beffica is a gossip who works with you to see the private life of the other residents of the town, and while Shelda seems like she’s a fairly basic new age hippie when you meet her, your quests for her will gradually bring to light what she actually believes.
The Grumpus residents of Snaktooth Island convene and discuss their situation at many points, the player learning more about the world and situation Snaxburg found itself in as more and more characters begin to return. Some are admittedly a bit simplistic, Gramble seeming to revert to accusing people of eating the Bugsnax he raises as pets rather often and the archaeologist Triffany having her personal quest line end without a big payoff, but other quests will have you learning not just about the individual Grumpus you’re talking to but their interpersonal relationships. The scientist Floofty clashes with their conspiracy-obssessed brother Snorpy while Snorpy has an unspoken romantic interest with his close friend, the supportive body-builder known as Chandlo. Your time on the island is built to get you attached to this cast and the finale, despite taking some unexpected dark turns, serves to pay off a lot of the small character threads you became invested in by doing quests for them.
The Grumpuses will guide your exploration of the island with their quests, but they also relate to Bugsnax in one other way beyond telling you which ones to go grab. When a Grumpus eats a Bugsnak, part of their body will be replaced with food. If you feed something like a Buffalocust to a character, you can turn their nose into a buffalo wing, and while at first the body part replaced with the food item is random, you later get the option to customize the Grumpus’s body as you please. There is no functional purpose to having a limb replaced with food even though some characters seem convinced that doing something like replacing arms with cinnamon rolls will make them stronger. Part of this is certainly because your character actually never replaces any pieces of their body with food, but it also frees up the player to customize the islanders as they like. You can make someone an absurd hodgepodge of the silliest food you found on the island or try to have them stick to a theme, and besides achievements tied to this aspect, you’re pretty much given license to feed them however you like with whatever you like. Even when a character has coconut shell hands or sushi skin they are still able to elicit a good amount of pathos surprisingly, so while we are dealing with some absurd concepts in Bugsnax, the characters manage to be down to earth when appropriate and thus a highlight of the experience.
THE VERDICT: Despite some rehashed design ideas, the creatures at the core of Bugsnax are cute critters that tie together an adventure that actually finds more of its appeal from its Grumpus characters. The islanders on Snaktooth Island all have fun personalities and interesting connections with each other, their quests more interesting because of what you learn about them while you’re off grabbing the Bugsnax they wish to eat. It is a shame that the Trip Shot reduces bug hunting down to such a simple task, but some boss fights and interesting locations keep the gameplay entertaining enough to carry its part in unraveling the mysteries surrounding the strange but colorful world created for this charming little adventure.
And so, I give Bugsnax for PlayStation 5…
A GOOD rating. A lot of Bugsnax’s positive aspects are tied up in its Grumpuses. The characters have fun little arcs, dialogue that is both well written and performed excellently, and customizing them with the food you feed them is a neat little touch despite it not having a gameplay purpose. The citizens of Snaxburg tie into the boss fights, give meaning to your work catching bugs, and while some of them are simplistic or don’t get as much screen time as the others, your time spent with them is where Bugsnax really feels like it’s at its best. The Bugsnax themselves aren’t bad, but they are definitely the area to point at for improvement, the gradual homogenization of them robbing the mild puzzle element featured early on when Trip Shot wasn’t the solution to most of your problems. Even with a conservative count of what could be considered a recolor or flavor variation, over 1/3 of the 100 Bugsnax aren’t original concepts, and couple that with the catching methods not being as diverse as you’d hope, and its clear that more time should have been spent on developing these critters. Greater variety in the Bugsnax would definitely push up this game’s gameplay to the level of quality to match its writing and characters, but it still manages to be a game that doesn’t get dull because of the love put into creating unique members of the Bugsnax species and the world they inhabit.
It may very well be the need to release it on time or some budgetary constraint lead to the creatures of Bugsnax not being as varied as you’d hope, but Snaktooth Island is still an entertaining visit thanks to what is included. The Bugsnax are a cute way of fulfilling objectives for quests involving likeable characters, and while you may be laying Trip Shots down a lot, you’re doing so to catch banana grasshoppers as they leap between trees, melt popsicle beetles with fire, and stop the speedy Oreo spiders from running away. While there’s a few good in-universe reasons you wouldn’t want to go to this island full of squabbling Grumpuses and mysterious disappearances, actually playing the game Bugsnax is a delightful little time.