Bugsnax Review

Bugsnax’s premise is simple enough to fit inside its catchy theme song. The titular creatures are kind of bugs, kind of snacks, and you find and catch them in your trap. Bugsnax are Snaktooth Island's native lifeforms. Think Jurassic Park or King Kong’s Skull Island, only the monsters are made out of fruits, burritos, and rotisserie chicken. Living desserts are extremely my jam. The 100 different species sport adorably goofy designs reminiscent of past pet monsters from games like Pokemon and Viva Piñata, while still having their own shared aesthetic. Bugsnax snail

You travel across diverse biomes as you capture and catalog these creatures in a first-person viewpoint. When you arrive in a new area, you’ll want to look around and see how the Bugsnax behave in the wild before you figure out a strategy. Sticky Cinnasnails cling to mountain cliffs. Shy Peelbugs hide inside hollow logs washed up on beach sands. Some Bugsnax only appear at night, but leave behind residue during the day. Scanning Bugsnax gives you clues about their behavior you can access in your journal.

Bugsnax’s most clever solutions come when you hatch a scheme that seems impossibly harebrained, but miraculously works. Octodad had similar highs whenever you managed to succeed at a basic human task with your floppy noodle limbs. Not to spoil every puzzle, but a real “Eureka!” moment for me came when I realized I could use a launchpad to fling my trap into the air and catch a flying cheese puff with the right timing. Because these answers feel so organic, the result of observing how interlinking gameplay systems and AI behaviour interact, Bugsnax sometimes feels like Baby’s First Immersive Sim. Kids who grow up on this will later love Deus Ex and Thief.

Catching Bugsnax is fun for the sake of it, but the game features far more story than I expected, contextualizing your journey. You play as a Grumpus, a race of Muppet-looking, walrus-monster people. Specifically, you play as a journalist who traveled to Snaktooth to find Lizbert Megafig, the legendary missing explorer who first encountered Bugsnax. To do so, you’ll first need to find and interview the dozen other misfit Grumps on the island and get them to return to your home settlement at Snaxburg.

These characters give you main quests and side quests that create the game’s overall structure. There’s nothing stopping you from catching random Bugsnax for yourself, but to progress you need to catch specific Bugsnax for specific Grumps. Feeding Bugsnax to your fellow Grumpus also mutates their limbs for some family-friendly body horror. Turn a leg into frenchy fry or a hand into a piece of popcorn. You can’t eat Bugsnax yourself, though, so don’t expect any puzzles where you need to give yourself giant pizza slice wings to fly over obstacles or something, as cool as that animal-based gameplay may sound.

Beyond the novelty of Bugsnax themselves, the game also wants you to get deeply invested in these characters and their personal issues. The cast (with chef’s kiss names) feels like the cross-sample of personalities that make for a great, dramatic reality show. Dig up dirt for gossipy Beffica. Make one-hit wonder Wiggle feel like a relevant musician again. Shady salesman Cromdo Face also has a new grift in the works. The overall goal of rebuilding the town saves Mayor Filbo from feeling like a failure. Stellar voice-acting from video game veterans like Debra Wilson and Yuri Lowenthal up the production value of the surprisingly chatty game.

Thoughtful, progressive, and vaguely melancholic character relationships mixed with a wacky candy-colored atmosphere strikes a tone not unlike modern acclaimed Cartoon Network shows, such as Adventure Time and Steven Universe. The way the narrative unfolds as you piece personal anecdotes together recalls emotional indie first-person interactive story games. There’s even a quest called Gone Home.

Bugsnax’s bold ingredients taste great individually, and even create surprising harmony together, but don’t always quite come together into a completely cohesive dish. The story, while well-done, takes up just a bit too much of the focus. It veers into melodrama. I simply enjoyed carefully catching candy critters more than listening to sad walruses, as compelling as those walruses can be.

Perhaps with less story some gameplay issues could’ve been ironed out more. Bugsnax is at its best when I feel one with nature, tools prepared and ready to take in its weird lush landscapes. Despite the feeling of a big seamless island, the individual environments are ultimately pretty modest and segmented by awkward loading screens. You also can’t fast travel, so expect to backtrack through old areas. I would have preferred a more open-ended map with a greater focus on pure exploration.

Wrangling some late-game Bugsnax also becomes a little annoying because of the number of systems that come into play. Getting constantly frozen by a walking popsicle is too funny to be that frustrating, and blasting it with chocolate sauce to lure a flaming marshmallow creature to melt its ice armor sounds wonderful on paper. Comedy aside, manipulating the elements also brings back pleasant The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild memories. But trying to actually execute these more complex plans, getting those moving pieces in sync, is a bit tedious.

Still, Bugsnax is so gentle and chill it’s impossible to ever get truly mad during the campaign, which took me about seven leisurely paced hours to finish. It’s so nonviolent you can’t even die. The tasks it asks you to perform are so unique that it’s worth putting up with some occasional jank and unironic dialogue like one character saying, “The Bugsnax will never love you!” while another responds, “You don’t know anything about love! That’s why your wife left you!”