Cinematic platformer Bionic Bay opens on a scene of a very large egg doing very bad things - easily my third favourite genre of speculative fiction. You awake to a world of tree trunks that twist like viscera and corroded contraptions powered by luminous goop that’s stored in the balls, uh, big glass orbs. A beam of light soon fills your character with newfound vigour, which is a nice moment of triumph in what otherwise feels like a deeply oppressive rust pit, all unsteady platforms and jagged pipes.
It doesn’t take long before you start spotting examples of the reason Bionic Bay went viral earlier this week . Above your head hangs a painstakingly detailed mass of vents and cables, looming lifelike with dust and shadow and history. I stood and stared because I’d seen how the sausage was made, but I like to think I would have lingered longer than usual anyway.
It really is just that impressive. Your guy is much more athletic the average hapless Inside or Limbo trundler, able to pull of leaping aerial rolls, huge dives, and massive jumps. You’ll need them, too.
Laser beams, exploding barrels, and other hazards are rife. It’s much closer to a traditional platformer in this sense, but checkpoints are very frequent. Also, your dude has some powerful ragdoll going on, so it’s also just very entertaining to watch him get blasted across the screen into walls.
Soon, you’ll get a little gizmo that lets you swap places with environmental objects, opening the game up to clever traversal puzzles. It’s also just very creative with its challenges. On one screen, you’ll be timing rolls to match a steam vent's emissions of searing liquid that would otherwise melt you.
On the next, you’ll be hoisting yourself up on what look like stars sparkling through a crimson nebula. It very much nails the cinematic platformer feel of being a bumbling little dude, very out of your depth at all times. In that Xitter clip I shared up top, the artist shows off the incredible amount of work that went into that single tree trunk, then shares a clip of the player character sprinting past the trunk in a few seconds.
To pour this much work into something so many won’t notice is madness, which is to say it’s the sort of deeply human expression of artistry that keeps me getting up every morning to write about games. Thanks mates! Bionic Bay has a demo here ..
