My first impression of Bionic Bay came before I had even played the preview build. Hitting the install button, I prepared to tab away and do something else – but before I had even decided what that something else may be, I heard the telltale trill that the game had finished its download. Okay, maybe the game has a launcher and I had only downloaded that gateway to the Bionic Bay.
But nope, this was the game ready to go. Whatever else I was planning could wait.
Don’t you hate it when your manager supervises you via giant floating head
Like all great tales of disaster, Bionic Bay starts with a mysterious work environment being engulfed in a flash of light. You, a bearded science dork, are happily tickety-tapping on a computer, while other more illustrious colleagues appear to be examining some kind of large robotic egg thing. Cue flash, and they are all seemingly atomised and you are similarly evaporated and deposited into the ruins of whatever immense facility was dedicated to robo-egg research. Or is it somewhere else entirely? Your keyboard jockey self isn’t quick to speak up. So your journey out of this mess begins, like so many great resonance cascades before it.
A quick bath in a convenient beam of light has you ready to duck, dive, leap and lunge through this brutal industrial space, as you are now capable of jumping impressive distances and surviving falls that would end a lesser human. Where you are hardly matters, the desire to not be in this place immediately takes hold. Everything is cramped and dangerous, with a yawning pit beneath you motivating your jumps to find their footing.
At first, you are simply leaping and grabbing on to whatever allows your hands to find purchase, be it a ledge or a robust load-bearing switch, but soon you find that this entire complex has deep OH&S issues. Lasers have no safety barrier, enormous pipes break away when you step on them (oops) and I would love to see the planning meeting that called for automatic weapons to fire onto moving conveyor belts. It’s easy to see why old mate likely stuck to his desk.
Try explaining this in your incident report
Thankfully, navigating these environments is deeply satisfying. Your jumps have that Halo-esque floatiness to them, meaning mid-course corrections are not just okay, they are encouraged. With a roll and an air-borne FLING to eke out a little more distance, you are constantly scanning where you can soar to next – threading yourself like a needle between hazards. It’s a little bit Super Meat Boy meets Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee – albeit without the hair-pulling frustration of constant pixel-perfect legwork. The game is careful to make sure that any sequence that asks for maximum effort is followed by a more relaxed portion, usually dripping with visual aesthetic niceness and ‘ooh’ factor.
Bionic Bay is one of those fantastic experiences that leverages simplistic visuals to awesome effect. The game is all fire and zero smoke, with stunning pixelated environments harbouring deadly machinery and perilous paths. It does a fantastic job of prodding a questioning lobe in your mind, because while none of it really tries to make sense, you feel indebted to try and understand what these mighty contraptions are meant to do …besides maim you.
Right as I had started to feel like a perfectly adequate parkour specialist, the game hit me with its first major curveball. A doodad left on the corpse of an ex-colleague offered me the ability to teleport …kinda. This was more of a swap-inator, a tool that would let me tag an inanimate object and then trade places with it at the press of a button. Initially it was a magnificent method of clearing blocked passageways, as I exchanged my being with whatever crate of crap was gumming up my progress. But soon, I encountered more creative methods of swapping – such as leaping to my death, only to rapidly transfer a floating platform there instead – or leaping onto a switch to then BAMF away, leaving a crate in my stead. The whole concept of it was so simple, so straightforward, that I couldn’t help but meticulously plan the most efficient swaperoonies to make my traversal as showy as possible.
A tilting platform that points directly at three grinders – a staple in most industrial environments
Deeper into this nightmarish citadel of malevolent manufacturing, I started to encounter more and more threatening things. The game doesn’t appear to have enemies in a pure sense, at least not in the preview build – but there are still plenty of threatening entities out to get you. Malicious machinery is festooned across every surface, like metal presses or molten slag pourers – and at one point, I swear I was being chased by living sparks. Across the ten levels afforded to me, I continued to marvel at the new and exciting ways this terrible space made itself unwelcome to me – as I laughed and swapped myself with giant metal orbs to escape another spinning laser. I never felt safe while spelunking this mostly-metal network of death, but I also never felt like I was ill-equipped to continue my progress.
After a short interstitial level that swapped my teleport-doodad for time manipulation, the game changed gears again and introduced new helpful elements to shake things up. Green lasers that serve as aggressive jump pads opened new doors for moving forward, although they could also prove to be just as deadly if my angle was wrong. There’s a level of absurd physical comedy as your simple scientist stick-self gets flung through the machinations of this disaster, with one section seeing you getting ragdolled through a colossal set of orbs, Plinko style, before crashing to the floor none the worse for wear. Most of the games’ orchestrated falls result in some kind of safety net, like ooze or a steady decline to slow you down – but when the deadly thud comes, it’s a hefty one.
As you start to become a pro at this human flinging path to glory, you begin to understand why the game also comes stickered with an offer to take yourself online and race other people. When all the moving parts fall into place, and you are deftly dodging blistering slag and beams of superheated light – you get a curious itch in your brain that wonders just how good you are. Sure a quick dip into the Racing mode against other people’s ghosts might humble you, but at least now you know where you stand.
At the end of your road, perhaps the stars themselves will offer a foothold to continue
I could feel the preview coming to a close when suddenly everything happening on screen started to feel like a final exam – every trick I had in my playbook got pulled into service as sections became a Rube-Goldberg machine of bombs, lasers and gunfire. My tiny rubbery man would leap and roll into props, rapidly tag them for the swap-inator then transport myself out of harm’s way in a fraction of a second – hurling myself into a gravity vent to gently carry me away from the action. I was a master of this domain, with each failure just feeling like a lesson on my path to mastering whatever peril I was in.
In just a few hours, Bionic Bay had me developing a very specific set of skills. What compels a man to dive-roll through sawblades? What kind of creature becomes adept at hurling themselves into a laser, only to trade places with a floating barrel to block it? Bionic Bay answers these questions by first asking them.
And the overall reasoning behind all of them is simple: Because it’s fun.
Bionic Bay will launch on PS5 and PC on April 17.
Previewed on PC using code provided by the publisher
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