BLUF: A light-hearted, and surprisingly poignant, story about relationships and catching bugs.
Bugsnax is a relaxing, relatively stress-free game that provides a bit of puzzle/problem solving while enjoying an interesting story. The design team went out of their way to make the game as user friendly as possible. You can’t die, and even the “aggressive” bugs you encounter will only knock you around, occasionally set you on fire (you just run around until the flames go out, no damage), or encase you in a block of ice. Even if you get knocked “out of bounds”, you’ll reappear at the beginning of the zone. There are some design flaws that I feel rob this game of a five-star rating, and replay ability is limited, as there are only a few instances where your dialogue choices will prompt a different response.
Switching between tools can be a bit cumbersome. Some of the tool uses are not intuitive, creating frustration when you are trying to line up a trap. Specifically, this comes into play when trying to place the launchpad onto a surface and create a trajectory line or when trying to place the Trip Shot line onto a surface. Sometimes you can place it against a tree trunk, other times you cannot, and there doesn’t seem to be an explanation as to why this is.
Catching the bugs becomes repetitive, but considering the target audience, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The tutorial missions are extremely well-formed, guiding you to your objectives without overly holding your hand. The difficulty of the challenges has a nice progression overall. There are only a few occasions where you’ll receive a mission and have little idea of how to accomplish it (because you don’t have access to a specific area or tool set just yet), but these exceptions are few and far between. The missions do get a little repetitive, but I think it’s a nice pace considering who
Bugsnax is designed for.
Perhaps the greatest challenge is that there is no real direction or clear objective markers for most of the missions. You’ll see checkmarks over a character’s head if you accomplish the mission and markers for where to turn in items, but there isn’t even an option to turn on a more obvious guidance marker in the HUD. In some ways this is a refreshing change of pace to be missing an objective line intruding on the environment; in others, it can leave you a bit lost. However, the areas to explore are a reasonable size, and it becomes simple to navigate your way around the island.
Achievement completion is very reasonable, and nothing is missable (there is a checkpoint created just before the “Point of no Return” set of quests) and the challenges are not overly taxing. I especially like that it’s not necessary to do every request you receive in the mailbox, as some of these require some finesse with the platforming aspects of the game.
The music is not intrusive and fits well with the environments. The voice acting is superb, and the story is surprisingly poignant for a children’s game. There are some detractors who are screaming about the “normalization” of some of the relationship types. Yes, there are gay relationships, there are straight relationships, and there’s a non-binary character. I think the social dynamics of this community are wonderfully presented. The characters encounter real relationship struggles, and they have to communicate with one another to resolve them.
Overall, this was a really fun game to experience and I definitely recommend giving it a try while it’s on GamePass!
4.0