SOMETHING DIFFERENT
This blog was originally intended as a place for me to share my thoughts and processes as a freelance photographer. Over the years I’ve ended up writing about a lot of different things, although some years I’ll write nothing at all. I’ve never been great at keeping a journal but sometimes I get the gumption to do some writing and I don’t have a space to share. This has turned in to that space. Today, I thought I might try something different and do a video game review. The thing is, I haven’t completed it, I’m only 10 hours in. I thought maybe someone might want to hear the thoughts of a person in the middle of their playthrough of a game. I also thought this would be a good place to share these thoughts rather than in my discord server with people who haven’t played.
Biomutant is something a bit different too. Biomutant is a game where you play in a post-post-apocolyptic world. So far they haven’t explicitly said “Earth” but it’s at least an Earth-like planet. Previous to your character’s existence, people ruined the planet by polluting the water, polluting the air, creating unmanageable amounts of waste - basically doing what humans are doing now. Eventually, the planet became uninhabitable and the people left on a ship called The Ark. That part of the storyline isn’t unique, there have been Ark stories for a long time. What’s interesting is that you play as a mutant animal hundreds or thousands of years in the future, after the people have left. There’s still evidence of the people with broken down cars, trash, derelict factories, et cetera, all of which can be explored and looted. The world is once again in peril, however. The World Tree is being eaten alive by four creatures called World Eaters. There are two animal factions at war as well. One faction wants to stop the World Eaters and fix the planet. The other faction wants the World Eaters to finish eating so the world can die and start over again. You can choose which side to help. You can do good and follow your light aura, or you can do evil and follow your dark aura. Along the way you’ll level up attributes, find loot, mutate a bit more, and unlock machinery made by friends to help you along the way. It’s an open world adventure, so you can choose what to focus on as you play.
ENTIRELY FAMILIAR
The concept of the game is pretty neat but it’s fairly easy to tell where the designers got their inspiration. The four World Eaters is something straight out of Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. In BotW you are tasked with stopping the four Divine Beasts that are destroying Hyrule. In both games, each of the four bosses requires different tools, gear, resistances, and puzzle solving skills to defeat.
Much like in Breath of the Wild, you’ll be upgrading gear, weapons, and tools. In both games, you’ll require resistances to various elemental effects to reach certain areas. You’ll also need tools for specific tasks. In Biomutant, the first major tool I unlocked was the Googlide, which is a personal watercraft needed to fight the first World Eater. You do something similar in BotW where you ride Sidon, Prince of the Zora, only in Biomutant’s case you keep your Googlide permanently for travel. You also have a net, so far I’ve only used it to catch small birds to keep as pets. This doesn’t seem to do anything but increase your light aura. A crowbar for opening sticky doors, which you will need to upgrade to unlock even stickier doors. And a powerglove for punching down crumbling walls to access different areas. While there are many ways to draw connecting lines back to Breath of the Wild the way Biomutant handles weapons is completely different.
In BotW you find weapons regularly but they eventually break, which I found massively annoying. In Biomutant, weapons last forever. In fact, you are presented with loads of different ways to continually upgrade your weapons and armor. The main way is by looting crafting materials all throughout the world. The number of combinations of items you can throw together is pretty ridiculous. You could have a small dagger that is a piece of metal as the blade and a banana for a handle. Or you could make it a spear and put a stick as the handle. Or you could use a wrench as a handle and a put a piece of concrete covered rebar at the end and make a mace. Then you could put a hypodermic needle at the end of the rock to give it armor piercing stats. My current loadout is a flaming rolling pin with an ancient katana handle and a katana with a wrench handle with a hand saw in the middle of the katana blade for a little extra damage. Why don’t I put the ancient katana handle on the katana? I don’t know, I just chose not to! Creating weapons and armor is a lot of fun.
WHIMSY CENTRAL
Biomutant is absolutely gorgeous. Most post apocalyptic games end up in a grayscale environment with brown accents. Maybe some green from nuclear waste and red from blood. But generally they aren’t brightly lit and colorful environments. Boderlands does a good job introducing color to the world with their comic book style visuals but the overall environment is still pretty bleak. Not quite as bleak as Fallout, where there’s hardly a healthy tree or a blade of grass to be seen. Biomutant goes in the opposite direction with lush greenery everywhere. Even the hazerdous areas are bright and colorful. The only section I’ve found that is devoid of color is the aptly named Deadzone. It’s a shock going from these vibrant greens to the desolate wasteland of The Deadzone, it’s a great transition.
Your gear is also fantastically designed. If you want you could run around as a mousy samurai warrior, a total badass. Or, you could look like this -
Another thing that stands out to me is the fact that every upgrade you make on your weapons or armor has a visual effect. You can see my weird helmet has things sticking out the top. Those add 2% crit chance and some armor. I don’t know how those could possibly add to my crit chance, but they do, and I’m not mad about it. Even my shoulder pads have visual upgrades. If you add a syringe to your weapon you’ll see the little needle sticking out. If you look closely you’ll see a little spike sticking out of the front of my jacket. That adds a little effect as well. I’ve never seen this level of detail in upgrades and I’m absolutely loving it.
Traveling around reveals a lot of great elements as well. There are some cool creatures running around, some of them can be tamed to become your mount. There are plants that grow “green” which is used as currency. To collect it you have to jump through the hoop and there’s a fun little effect for that. There are piles of trash for you to knock down and mounds to get your little mousy hands in and dig through. Even some of the enemies that try to kill you are cute in their own little hideous way. It’s visually a very stimulating experience and I love the world and magical fantastic nature of everything.
WHIMSY OVERLOAD
There’s no denying Biomutant is a whimsical work of art. I know I said you’re a mutated animal but you’re kinda cute. You’re a little rodent who knows martial arts and can run around on all fours. The world is colorful and beautiful. You can see the roots of The World Tree sprawling in the distance and there are dilapidated structures overgrown by trees and vines all over the place. There’s also a narrator who is relaying the story of the world in a soothing voice in a British accent. They went all out creating a whimsical world but I think a little restraint would have helped tremendously.
The NPCs you meet don’t speak English, they speak a language made up for the game. Which is fine, plenty of games do that, and you have the narrator to translate for you. However, the narrator keeps all the slang in his translation. And there’s a lot of slang. Many common items that we know have been renamed. Sometimes it’s easily recognizable what the slang word actually is and sometimes it’s flat out nonsense. For instance, “stronk” is used a lot in place of “strong.” Pianos are called “strinplonks”, washing machines are called “clothes-soakers”, telephones are called “ring-dingers” but for some reason a phone booth is called a “pling-plong-booth.” I met an NPC who is a monster hunter, but in the game they refer to it as “Munster Honter.” Why? Almost everything is renamed in this sort of cutesy speak. I found an item yesterday that had the quality of “Rik-Rak.” What the hell is Rik-Rak? This makes it difficult to compare one item to another at a glance. They do include Roman numerals, so I’m assuming Rik-Rak, which has the Roman numeral for 3 assigned to it, is better quality than lousy, which has a roman numeral for 1. More egregious is the overabundance of slang used in dialogue. Here is a direct quote from the narrator -
Now that the Wiffle Dust is secured, Lump’s ready to yo-yo. His Disco Biscuits are known for their hullabaloo.
Wiffle Dust is something I had to collect so I vaguely know what that is. Lump is a baker, so I’m assuming “Lump is ready to yo-yo” means he’s ready to bake. I don’t know what it means that his cookies are known for their hullabaloo. This kind of nonsense talk is omnipresent. I love that they are creating their own slang and developing their world using language, but there comes a point where using it too much just makes for a confusing experience. Plenty of other media uses unique language specific to it to help create their world. Like in Battlestar Galactica they use the word “frak.” That is easy to grok. Other books and shows will include slang that are perfectly cromulent because of context. If there is too much of your made up language and slang you begin to lose the context of what these words mean and it becomes difficult to follow the story.
Another issue I have with how the story is delivered is that since the NPCs are speaking a made up language the Narrator has to translate it all. This means every line of dialogue is delivered twice. First, the NPC says their gibberish, then the Narrator translates. The subtitles don’t appear until the Narrator speaks, so a brief conversation can quickly turn in to a few minutes of dialogue with half of it you’re left to sit and wait for the NPC to finish speaking before you get the information you need. I think a solution to this would be to have the Narrator speak over the gibberish a second or two after the NPC begins speaking. Or to have the subtitles pop up during the gibberish segment. I dig what they’re trying to do but it just doesn’t move the story smoothly.
CONCLUSION
In the end, Biomutant is a game that I’m enjoying and will continue to play. The combat at first was kinda bland but as you level up and enemies become more difficult you can put together some insane combos of your melee weapon, ranged weapon, and special abilities. After defeating the first World Boss, you are presented with a dilemma which you need to weigh in on at the end of the game. A dilemma that I have no clue how I’m going to begin to resolve. I have also unlocked the second helpful vehicle for getting around and I have found a lot of fun parts to customize my Googlide. I’m continually finding silly hats to put on, crazy parts to upgrade my items, and unlocking special powers to keep combat interesting. I just wish the puzzles were more interesting. They’re basically all the same so far, you have 3 dials to rotate and you just have to match up the 2 colored lines.
There is still enough there left to be desired to make me think that nobody should feel like they’re missing out on something. Yeah, I’m having a lot of fun with it, but there are just enough aspects of the game that stick in my craw that make me think I could have waited for a sale. If you are experiencing FOMO, fear not. Although, in an age where so many games are launched in completely broken states I must say it’s really refreshing to have the game totally playable at launch. You won’t feel bad paying full price but you might feel better waiting for sale.