If you enjoy playing around with physics in games or just want a solid and fun platformer, Bionic Bay is a gem of a game you don’t want to pass up. It sits somewhere in between a slower paced environmental puzzler and a zippy parkour platformer. One of the most impressive aspects of the experience is just how engaging the mixture of those two main ingredients are throughout. As a fan of both puzzle games and platformers, I felt totally satisfied on both ends of the spectrum.
That said, Bionic Bay isn’t strictly a puzzle game or strictly a precision platformer. Super Meat Boy this is not. Sure, there’s plenty of challenging sections, but there’s usually a slower physics-based puzzle right around the corner to mix up the pacing a bit. Freezing time to briefly platform across a series of spinning saw blades forced me to put on my Meat Boy or Celeste hat, only to require a slower methodical approach to a seemingly inaccessible cliff minutes later.
“Bionic Bay encourages active play through its dynamic physics engine to solve problems.”
I never found myself sitting there away from my controller thinking of solutions though. Bionic Bay encourages active play through its dynamic physics engine to solve problems. Every object, including a majority of environmental platforms, bends and moves when pressed with enough weight. My favorite example of this is the subtle way railing and outcroppings bend when the player hangs onto its edge. And the game gives you some fun abilities to manipulate all these environmental objects. The one you’ll use the most is the Swap ability.
You simply tag an object and hit the swap button to switch places with the tagged object. A surprising amount of objects can be swapped, from large asteroid-like platforms to small batteries. It’s fun just to play around with various objects and see how they interact with the environment.
A lot of the unpredictable fun involved with these interactions hinges on the impressive animations and effects built into the 2D engine. Lasers burn away surfaces creating individual spark particles, and what the deadly objects do to your character is downright slapstick. Your character’s limbs move independently, resulting in hilarious death animations. There’s a meticulous attention to detail regarding how elements like fire, ice, and the like affect objects.
“Your character’s limbs move independently, resulting in hilarious death animations.”
One of my favorite demonstrations of these elemental affects is using the Swap ability to move a series of rock platforms directly in front of a rotating ice laser, creating a frozen staircase for me to climb across. Individual frost particles dust off of the platforms, which just goes the extra mile enhancing the game’s 2D presentation. There are many other creative ways the game uses elemental effects with your physics-based abilities.
But again, it isn’t all about puzzles. The game uses these physics-based tools to create nail-biting platform sequences. Using Swap in rapid succession to narrowly escape a quickly advancing sawblade deeply satisfied the precision platformer fan in me. And the fact that the game spreads these challenging moments between methodical puzzles just makes me appreciate them all the more.
Speaking of precision, the movement controls are snappy and responsive. Your character turns on a dime and you can adjust movement mid-air with ease. Due to the character’s loose limb animations, movement isn’t quite as direct as, say, Mega Man 11 or Celeste, but it’s certainly responsive enough to thread the needle in any situation. If you narrowly miss a platform, your character will automatically hang on ledges until you climb up or decide to fall downward. There’s also a very speedy roll that can be spammed in quick succession, not unlike the modern Donkey Kong Country games.
My only gripe, aside from the loose limb animations sometimes obfuscating precision, is that the game has no camera control to speak of at all. While the general zoomed-out perspective does a fair job letting you see around your character, there’s still some occasional trial and error regarding where you can and cannot go. There’s several times where the way forward is beyond visible range, requiring a leap of faith. There are other times when it seems like the way is down, when actually leaping downward leads to a bottomless pit. Giving the player some manual camera control to know if a pit leads to death or not would help eliminate this occasional trial and error.
“There’s several times where the way forward is beyond visible range, requiring a leap of faith.”
In a similar vein, the amount of environmental detail in the foreground and backgrounds, while rich and atmospheric, can make it difficult at times to tell what is interactable and what’s decoration. The game is usually good about differentiating foreground from background objects, but I did die trying to jump on a biomechanical plant a couple times due to these occasional depth perception issues.
Thankfully, the player won’t waste too much time backtracking to their previous spot due to persistent checkpointing. I never once had a checkpoint so far back that I had to repeat anything substantial. Every obstacle has a checkpoint before it that loads you back in your spot instantly. The fast loading and frequent checkpoints certainly lessons the blow of those trial and error moments.
Much like the seamless blending of platforming and puzzles, the levels themselves feel contiguous. In fact, I didn’t realize the game even had levels until I returned to the main menu and saw the chapter select screen. You’ll know you’ve hit the end of a level when you go through one of the tubes or narrow tunnels leading to very brief loading screen. Part of the seamlessness is due to levels carrying over some of the backgrounds and aesthetics into the next area.
The world feels organic and natural without clear shifts in theme and mechanics between levels. Still, Bionic Bay is about as linear as platformers come. You typically just have one path forward and there’s no routing or side areas to speak of in the game. There’s also no collectables, which may bring a tear to collectathon fans, but this game tries to make up for it in other ways.
Bionic Bay is adequately replayable despite its linearity. This is because its brilliantly catered to speed running. The physics render most situations highly variable, which means cheesing certain puzzles is possible. I love how there’s various ways to go about a situation, yet it’s not so open-ended it breaks the game. You still have to bring some skill to platforming sequences.
“Bionic Bay Online has a seasonal rotation of time trials going through snippets from the game’s levels.”
To accommodate how speed run-friendly this game is, there’s a dedicated time trial mode just for that purpose, though it’s currently online in nature. Bionic Bay Online has a seasonal rotation of time trials going through snippets from the game’s levels. It’s a great way to squeeze more replayability out of the game by speed running sections and posting results on the leader boards.
But it isn’t the leaderboards or times that I’ll remember Bionic Bay for, it’s the unique atmosphere and tone. The devs cited Another World as a key inspiration, and it shows. The atmospheric storytelling is prevalent, though not so overt and in-your-face as to feel ‘gamey’. You’ll notice subtle little oddities along the way that get you thinking about what happened to this world.
The game addresses some questions through occasional data logs, which often provide small bits of background info, but not a whole lot. Like Limbo and Inside, Bionic Bay leaves it up to the player to piece together what happened using contextual clues and environmental details. And again, there’s nothing too crazy in the environment, but enough subtlety to provide some context.
“You’ll notice subtle little oddities along the way that get you thinking about what happened to this world.”
Helping sell the environments is, of course, the meticulous pixel art across every screen. I love the biomechanical designs of the backgrounds, even if they repeat between levels a quite a bit. The creepy sound effects add to the atmosphere a lot too, though I do sometimes wish there was more music to punctuate the ambience. Some players may feel that sections go on for too long without any music. The game takes a Half-Life approach to its music, which works at times, but made the soundscape feel a tad emptier than I’d have liked.
All in all, Bionic Bay is a brilliant puzzle platformer. It’s got an equal serving of precision platforming challenge and thought-provoking puzzles and mixes these two styles up well. Whether you’re in the mood for an atmospheric experience like Inside or want to stretch your platforming skills with some physics tools, Bionic Bay is the surprise gem that satisfies both cravings beautifully.
This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 5.
