Just for the purpose of tangential, dare I say misdirecting, introduction to Bugsnax, I want to comment on something I read in a review for the game (sourced to lost memory - I don’t remember which writer or website produced/published the original I’m here paraphrasing): Bugsnax ‘the song’ became a cornice pigeoned for discussion on the game more memetic than the game’s trailer, press details, or development credentials were able to balloon to in comparison. This idea of estrangement between appendages operating asynchronous but tangential seems weirdly media illiterate in a world overflowing with advertisements which are known to be what substantiates entirely the experience of a product; to talk about the song was just the same as talking about the game’s details or other pre-play-eminences in as affirming of an experience as one’s taste sweet in the jaw with homey nostalgic Coca-Cola or one’s athletic dive down the street resplendent interiorally when clothed in Lululemon. The ephemera which affects for our experience as receivers the display of pulse is indistinguishable, and largely can be seen as a signal without a source independent, from that which is for it the producer/partner. So it’s a good thing the song goes off, because by itself it adds a half star to the review.

I didn’t know what to expect of Bugsnax going into it, skimming past the cover art and attenuating not at all, as is typical for my ‘hype’ intolerant frame, to details coming out, prior to my playing, from reviews and other sources of discussion on the game for information regarding the genre, tone, themes, aesthetics, or other component properties of the work. I expected something saccharin and purposefully childish for the affections of whatever emotional doleances could be brought to interaction between it and I, which was seen, of course, through, but that didn’t carry weight into my surprise at the completeness Bugsnax makes of its lineage with Slime Rancher. For a game which is meant to be, on some level, a marquee landmark for incursions breaking off, homonymically, of expected limitations of aesthetic purport which can be transgressed expressively but refuse to be usurped by ‘serious’ conceptions of form, its largeness of subversion comes most from the mechanical inception by the preceding Slime Rancher’s obviousness. Spoilers for the narrative subversions unveiled as the game progresses from the mid to late play (although frankly, if you couldn’t catch onto the horror of a game which complicates its satire of Colonial expeditionary assimilations/perpetuities of indomitable spirit and virtue by making the the explorers have 1) their contact with indigenous species be parastically relational on the part of the indigenous species, not the exploratory venture, being invasive 2) having the horrors of the assimilation manifest by taking on aspects of the met species and 3) having the metamorphosed ‘leader’ of the expedition exceed past the unconglomerated mass of things encountered, then I can’t say you aren’t just into that shit) but for a game which is developed almost as a hock to how far our cultural platitudes of cuteness exacerbated beyond natural possibility and horror transgressing all conception of inner and outer human tidiness can meet when the poles are stressed, for the purposes of not obviously flagging those two thing in the way animal mascots meta-textually to their source are made rugged, horrific, and realistic, the obviousness of its influence by Slime Rancher yet with none of the fluidity or simplicity of mechanic that game achieved is the only real subversion of expectation. I was inching through the tediousness of play and setting and character in the hopes that I would reach the moment in the game that exceed beyond a mobile game facade of knock off to Slime Rancher, and it never arrived - turning what was a rare feat of expressionistic resource gathering into a non intuitive and clunky puzzle game for which solutions matter not at all to the economy of the game.

Of course, that is part of the subversion of Bugsnax: a Slime Rancher-like that, instead of following through a period of isolation and downtroddenness by manipulating a land to your own enterprisal whims (the thematic failing of Slime Rancher), allows the player to enter into a space for which such a tycoon facilitation seems so easy and obvious to nurture into mass successive industrialisation that its materials are literally grown from the ground prepackaged, dusted with cheese, and uttering a catch phrase; though this fails due to the player being characterizes as less a perpetuator of the holistic crimes and as more of an observer implicated but not guilty of the hubris indicting the Snaxburgians. However, this perversion of that colonizing and harvesting ideal is belied in the play: every ‘prey’ is encountered with the rote mechanized capturing of their forms built into their nature, with no necessitated predatory behaviour formed on the behalf of the player. In Slime Rancher, there was at least a sense that corralling and manipulating the Slimes on the conveyor belt of industry was against the natural state of them. In Bugsnax, the puzzle piecing of capture and netting seems to be deigned (which can be explained as a ploy of the parasitic form of the threat, but mechanically that isn’t conveyed in either the ease with which the Snax come to the player nor the player’s supposed forfeiture of self to the Snax influence) by the order of the devs and, to a lesser extent, God. With no real obvious impression of the dynamic played between the Journalist and the Bugsnax, there is no justification of either the capture and the movement across the island, which is the greatest flaw of the game as an open world venture. We have utterly transcended the place in which any game which desires to be more than corridors cannot have movement which either a) feels appropriate consistently with the thematic and tonal elements of its design, a la Pathologic, or b) which is the primary point of enjoyment across the entirety of the game, a la Sunset Overdrive. Walking in Bugsnax is so consistently boring, so entirely devoid of interest (due to the non-functional economy of Bugsnax track and capture being anti-motivating to further exploration, a system which would be flagging if there was if there could be anything at all felt from the truly terrible character writing) that the simulational elements become obvious in a way that spells death for an open world game: you start to look for the corners after doorways and not for the routes which you’ve never taken before between A and B.

I wish Bugsnax were better - it didn’t really have the potential if this is what they wanted to do with it but I still wish that it weren’t so frustratingly obvious in its efforts. I love that the Snaxburg inhabitants are queer, that the player is supposed to be reassured after an arm is turned into a raspberry, that BUNGER BUNGER BUNGER BUNGER is a thing. But it’s just a bad game for the same reason Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a bad book and Banksy is a bad artist: they attempt pastiche and satire with the aesthetics of cynical cuteness trying to derive humanity from consumer researched and developed trash media, aka the parasitic Bugsnax of our culture.