Bugsnax

Despite being thoroughly described to me beforehand, Bugsnax still managed to be regularly surprising. It’s most often compared to Pokémon Snap, which is accurate, except that Bugsnax is not a rail shooter and therefore much more open-ended. The tools it gives to manipulate its titular creatures follow suit, including springboards, tripwires, and a sauce-launching slingshot, all of which interact with each other and the environment in inventive ways. Pokémon Snap also never had a drug metaphor as its central narrative thread, nor did it have a mechanic where you morph Professor Oak’s limbs into pieces of consumed critters, as amazing as that would have been.

Unfortunately, all of this wonderful weirdness and openness comes with a cost, so the visuals are decidedly subpar, some of the tool interactions don’t work as cleanly as they could, and there are a number of spots of missed potential. The most pronounced of these is that there’s little to do with captured Bugsnax other than complete fetch quests, but I also wish there was more of a purpose to the NPC-morphing mechanic and more substance to the NPC-interviewing segments. The latter gets a bit of a pass because the writing and voice acting in those segments, as in the rest of the game, are superb. It should come as no surprise that a game this goofy-looking is frequently hilarious, but it’s extremely refreshing how mature and meaningful it can be at the same time.