Are you a fan of those moody side-scrolling adventure games like LIMBO and INSIDE; you know the ones that are primarily shadow and silhouette with minimal music and little to no story or motivation. It’s been a while since we had one of those but now Bionic Bay has arrived to satisfy our cravings, and it is quite the tasty treat. Those other games had their own gimmicks, usually based on some excellent physics modeling, and Bionic Bay is no different but with the added benefit of being able to tag and swap locations with certain world items. These can be as small as a box or as big as a piece of broken architecture or rock, and this teleport/swap mechanic is used to great extent the deeper you go in the game.
The story is pretty basic and starts with an explosion at the lab when scientists start poking around something that looks like an egg sack with a laser beam. After the “incident” you’ll be playing as a lone scientist that is part ragdoll and part stick figure, as you jump, climb, run, tumble, and fall your way through a seemingly endless series of sinister environments that blur the lines of science and fantasy. Most of the game is traversal with a few environmental puzzles tossed in that require the tagging of certain items followed by expertly timed swaps.
The presentation is flawless and scales to most any reasonably gaming PC, and plays perfectly with a gamepad or you can struggle a bit with a mouse and keyboard. Framerate is fluid and the 4K visuals are colorful despite the stark contrast of foreground and background art. The sense of scale is unbelievable when the camera pulls out and your scientist is reduced to only a few pixels. The camera work is excellent and never loses focus on what’s important. Bionic Bay is also great with its auto-checkpoint system that saves after nearly every screen or significant accomplishment.
There is also an online component that will let you speedrun the game and log your times on the leaderboard if you are into that kind of thing, but the core game is single player only. You can even customize the look of your scientist with dozens of choices for clothing and such. While I personally don’t care about rushing through a game or posting on leaderboards, this is a nice extension to the 8-10 hour story mode. Bionic Bay is also verified for Steam Deck and is perfectly suited for pick-up and play gaming.
If you look at the screens or trailers for Bionic Bay and think, “that’s a game I’d like to play” then you are probably right. There are no surprises here other than the amazing creativity that is showcased every time a scene changes and new exciting tech, colors, and physics puzzles present themselves. There are no game-stopping puzzles, and the story does get a bit more interesting as the game nears its conclusion, but these games are seldom about the story; merely surviving to the end, and Bionic Bay makes this quest for survival very interesting from start to finish. Definitely worth a look.
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