Bugsnax (2020)

Welp, that finally marks the end - and thus getting 100% achievements - in Bugsnax. Definitely a worth title, definitely unique, and even in spite of its flaws, which are minimal at best and easily overlooked, it's definitely something that people should check out. In the end, I enjoyed my time with it, even at its lowest points.

Only reason this took me so long to finish was because I have a nasty habit of getting to the end of stuff and never finishing it, be it a TV show or a game or whatever. So while everything else was done in this by the end of May, I didn't finish this until tonight. That's a habit I'm trying to break.

Anyway, good game overall. Glad I did it.

I will say this much for Bugsnax (I'm sorry, I know it sounds like I'm not enjoying the game, but I assure I really am!), and that is it's super nice to play something else with a lesbian couple at the forefront - not to mention other lgbt characters in major roles - because throughout my entire time gaming I've only come across a handful of others. Some are built that way, like Gone Home, while others, such as Mass Effect or Life is Strange, are more or less up to player choice and not designed that way, which is understandable even if it sucks.

I don't want this to invite any hateful comments or whatever, either, I'm just showing my appreciation, because when I was growing up, there was basically nothing I saw that made me feel okay for being gay. I mean, it was the 90s/early 2000s, so it wasn't like it was the dark ages but it certainly isn't like it is today. I was often harassed, verbally or physically, for liking other girls, and so it's nice to see it now in mainstream games and more often than not celebrated for such. Even though a good percentage of the reviews on the Xbox store were negative towards these aspects, but that's sadly not unusual in the gaming community it seems, and that won't change anytime soon, sad to say. Maybe I'll be proven wrong, but whatever.

Anyway, I'm just glad that maybe other little queer girls won't feel like I did, and that's what I'm really happy about more than anything else. I don't ever want anyone to go through life feeling the way I had to, and still sometimes do thanks to internalized shame.

Coming up on the endgame here, I just wanna say I'm glad to have played it but I'll be even more glad to never play it again. While it has all the workings of something I should adore, there were just far too many either imperfections or outright poor decisions for it to be something I could adore.

Compared to their previous title, Octodad: Dadliest Catch, Bugsnax is a unique game, but a frustrating one that unfortunately lends itself far more to the frustration than the overall enjoyment. At least Octodad knew exactly what it was and never pretended to be anything more. Bugsnax has a great concept, cute style, and all that, but it's SO poorly implemented and optimized at times that it makes the game hard to actually appreciate and even harder to recommend to people.

While I haven't officially beaten it yet, and I still have to do the Isle of Bigsnax and then the overall endgame, I doubt my opinion will change much from now to then. Definitely glad I spent some time with it, but even more glad that I'll have 100% it in one run because I hope to never load it up again. It just did too much wrong for me to see it as something right, and that's a darn shame. Yes I had fun, I won't deny that...

...but I think I had far more frustration than fun, and ultimately there's just enough that's wrong with it, more than there is right.