Bionic Bay Review

I love indie platformers. The genre of moving a little person ever sidewards is an experience long since perfected, so the real beauty now comes from the twist that a developer will throw at it. Of course, this means you find yourself edging further into ‘gimmick’ territory as a means to separate each ‘run-and-jump’ dude outing – but now and then, you’ll sit down with something that isn’t posturing or pretending. It’s the real bloody deal.

Bionic Bay is one of those deals, dripping with well-deserved confidence that I could already taste in my early access preview, it comes as no surprise to me that it keeps up appearances through its full release.

Just another day at the office, am I right?

After a horrific workplace accident vaporises your entire …well, workplace, a lone scientist finds himself stuck in an odd labyrinth of industrial machinations. Think Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, but every madcap room of wonder is filled with malevolent devices that will incinerate, explode and amputate at any given moment. Your voiceless self has a very real motivation to leave this place, whatever this place may be – and so you will duck, dive, leap and fling yourself ever upward and outward in the hopes of escaping.

The way your goofy little nitwit is ragdolled across these desperately terrifying territories never ceases to entertain. It’s so reminiscent of the classic Porrasturvat – Stair Dismount, only without the chaotic lack of control that famously defined it – every savage impact is comedic in nature, and the ones you survive are the ones you treasure. Movement is simple, with a jump button and a roll button as your staples, both working in different ways depending on when you press them and how. You can clamber up things and grab nearly anything that looks grabbable – with the game being quite charitable with how close you need to be to get a handhold. You then supplement your base movement options with a couple of powers that are afforded at different points in the story – such as the ability to swap positions with an inanimate object or powerfully slam something out of the way.

The beauty of these power gimmicks is that they are always immensely simple to understand. The swap/teleport doohickey never evolves beyond the idea of flipping your position with that of a suitable object, so any puzzle that wishes for you to make use of this device will always ask you to do exactly that – the rest is simply timing and measuring the environment you are navigating. Standing on a moving platform that is slowly ferrying itself through deadly lasers? Better find an object you can conveniently swap to after the death beam has washed over it. A gun turret blasts any organic matter that runs in front of it? Why not punt a barrel past it and swap on the other side of the ‘certain death’ zone. Delightfully simple stuff but devilishly put together. Even something as mechanically rote as a bullet time meter has the approachable tightness of allowing you to rapidly toggle it on or off on demand, so you aren’t limited to living with enormous mistakes when it’s used incorrectly – just smaller, palatable ones.

Looming foreground mcguffins and immense background elements make the space a wonder to behold

The rest of the game’s depth comes from gubbins within the environment. One such mechanic involved nutty gravity well fields that entirely redefined how your regular platforming should work. I grimaced at the beginning of this, readying myself for a janky journey through frustration town, having witnessed this done to lesser effect in numerous other games. Seeing these cones of gravitational light stretching out in front of me filled me with dread – especially seeing the spinning death hazards lurking in the midst of them. But a closer glance made me realise that the intensity of their glowy cone actually suggested the safest path through them – simply put: stick to the brightest bits, you’ll eat less shit. Further proof that I gotta give the Bionic Bay devs their due, they know what’s up.

This silky smooth feeling of frustration-free fun is further elevated by the generous checkpoint system, with the game putting them in not only logical but lavishly helpful places. You need to scramble up 30 elevated crates that will routinely fall while you duck, dive and roll across them? You better believe boxes ten and twenty have checkpoints on them. This doesn’t cheapen the experience though; there are absolutely micro courses within some levels that set an expectation of what you should be able to achieve, and they are checkpointed accordingly. A conveyor belt of doom may stretch in front of you with zero points of rest, but it’s not an extravagantly lengthy ride– and it will end with the level complete. Lean a little forward in your chair and lock in, you’ll get it done and feel like a Bionic Bay badarse.

Something I absolutely applaud the developers for is how they approach ‘gotcha’ moments within the game. While extremely limited, there was the odd occasion where I would leap to a far-off ledge and grab it – just to realise it was going to imminently collapse. In that moment of panic, I don’t quite stick the conversion and find myself plummeting to my death. Rather than spawning at the last checkpoint, feeling like a buffoon and hearing the familiar HAW HAW of Simpsons bully Nelson in my ears – in a miraculous twist, I have been placed right after the moment I fell. Almost like the devs knew that nobody enjoys these moments as a shitty punishment, and instead lets us drop our cake AND eat it too. Marvellous.

‘Thing Lost Down The Sink’ simulator, only I’m heading upwards

This is all wrapped in a slick, but razor-sharp pixel aesthetic. At a glance, or in screenshots, you’d perhaps think it a tad cluttered – but in motion, everything is extremely readable. Even when the camera pulls back to give you one of those rare wide shots, and your scientist goober is now a micron on the screen, nothing is lost for where YOU are, and WHERE you are going. This alien space you inhabit is rendered well enough that you are never guessing for what is habitable ground, but you are also never at a loss for things to gawk at. And it only gets weirder as you move onwards and upwards.

The soundscape involved is also a thing of simplistic, purposeful beauty. Ominous machines hiss and beep and bloop with malicious intent, otherworldly devices hum in the background – this twisted expanse always feels deeply unwelcoming. The impactful boom of an explosive will always set you on edge, but similarly, the oddly satisfying thud of you activating the swapinator will have you feeling a little comfort. Music is not a huge component in your stay in Bionic Bay, but when it swells, it is to great effect – often punctuating a particularly tense moment and getting your heart racing alongside your scrawny scientist legs.

Tell me this spectacle isn’t dripping with otherworldly sauce

Final Thoughts

This is a game that hands you a hammer in the first thirty seconds, then introduces new and exciting nails for the next ten hours. A simple analogy, sure, but it works as beautifully as the game itself. Bionic Bay is one of those rare experiences that has such confidence in itself that it doesn’t need to muddy the water with bloat and uncertainty – it is precisely what it is, and what it is is excellent. Take a mystifying workplace accident, a rock solid visual identity and a hefty industrial soundscape, throw them together and serve on a bed of platforming mechanics that just refuses to quit.

Reviewed on PS5 and PC // Review code supplied by publisher

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