As befits a chaotic physics-based action-adventure game, Bionic Bay begins with a big bang. What follows hews to that scale, with your playable scientist character generally appearing as a tiny cluster of pixels amid the massive pipes, lasers, conveyors, and machinery of an alien laboratory torn asunder. Bionic Bay’s emphasis on fluid controls, explosive stunts, and novel gravity-defying platforming makes this more than just a memorable experience, so much so that there’s even an online mode with daily time trials to master.
Psychoflow Studio and Mureena Oy’s platformer is nothing if not mindful of its scientific theme: You’ll jump, roll, and dive as you dodge explosive mines and disintegrative goo, but you’ll have to combine those skills with know-how of the world’s technology. Your first upgrade comes in the form of a matter-displacement unit that swaps your location with that of another object’s, and later in the campaign you’ll gain the ability to briefly slow down time. Oh, and you’ll have to combine abilities with environmental hazards throughout: You can also slow down the flow of water in order to walk in it, and when gravity shifts, you can swing wires out of your way.
The game maintains a thrilling sense of momentum across its eight-hour campaign. There’s always something new to contend with, whether that’s a series of red-hot spheres that chase you down corridors, gravitational cores that suck you into their circumferences, or cryogenic rays that keep objects frozen in mid-air. Bionic Bay gets a lot of mileage out of these devices, and the online mode super-charges them and, in turn, the game for maximal replayability, bringing back familiar snippets of stages with new obstacles for players to challenge each day.
Bionic Bay’s campaign breaks up its action with zoomed-out shots at scale that demonstrate just how small you are, as when you clamber down the half-assembled arms of giant robots or squeeze through liquidy ducts. By contrast, the remixed online levels, in the most literal, murderous sense, are all killer, no filler: You’ll die many, many times learning the most effective way to bypass a corridor of buzzsaws, turrets, or sometimes both.
Given the game’s emphasis on platforming, it’s perhaps inevitable that the story feels like an afterthought. What little plot there is unfolds after that initial explosion, via text logs found on your colleagues’ corpses, and it doesn’t exactly clarify, for one, where you are. Your immediate need is to presumably return home, but good luck figuring out what that has to do with your mysterious employer, the Company, having been around in Roswell since at least 1947 or that the massive egg you were experimenting on was stolen from the jungles of Papua New Guinea.
In the end, the only relevant log in the game is the one that recognizes its own worthlessness, a system of recording that “only values information deemed beneficial to the mission,” with no regard for emotions. Why? Because when Bionic Bay stops trying to explain the science at its center and lets its environments speak for themselves, in everything from the monochromic backgrounds to the starkly foregrounded contraptions, you may just be filled with awe.
This game was reviewed with a code provided by Tinsley PR.
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