Bonelab was highly anticipated by the VR game community ahead of its release at the end of September 2022 for a variety of reasons.

• Stress Level Zero’s previous game, Boneworks, was praised as a boundary-pushing VR game, and many wanted to see what new innovations Stress Level Zero would bring to the medium next.
• Stress Level Zero’s games (much like those of FromSoftware’s Hidetaka Miyazaki (the director of Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls, Bloodborne & Elden Ring) or Five Nights at Freddy’s) have lore that many find captivating and were excited for more answers about the world Stress Level Zero have created & set all their games in.
• Stress Level Zero’s previous games (including the aforementioned Boneworks) were PC exclusive, whereas Bonelab was announced to be releasing on both PC & the Oculus (now Meta) Quest 2, bringing Boneworks’s revolutionary physics-based gameplay to the most popular VR headset ever, no gaming PC required (something a Quest 2 owner would need in order to play Stress Level Zero’s other games).

But what all of this should tell you is that Bonelab is not a game designed to be accessible to everyone (even though Stress Level Zero is making it easier for people to access it by porting it to Quest 2). This is a game that refuses to hold your hand. The puzzles will scramble your mind. Many comfort options offered in most other VR games (that require the player to move around in an environment larger than would be feasible to do so with just your own feet), like swapping smooth locomotion (where you use an analog stick on your controllers to walk in-game similarly to how you would in real-life) for teleportation or blinders for when you use an analog stick to look around are not present & if you don’t have much experience with VR (especially games with some form of locomotion) you will get nauseous. The story isn’t told in a conventional, spoon-fed manner, but rather is something you have to look for in clipboards & radio messages.

Speaking of the story, let’s talk about the campaign. Yes, while Bonelab is a spin-off that is mainly built & marketed around its modding tools & sandbox, it does also have a campaign to show off that sandbox & what Marrow is capable of. On a surface level, the story is serviceable. It is good enough to string you along to the end, but it can seem a little simplistic until you start digging deeper. A benefit of the campaign’s priorities is that it does have plenty of variety and you aren’t likely to get bored. The nature of the campaign also means that it has decent replayability to try out the various levels with whatever avatar you want. Switching avatars is also straightforward. The game gives you 5 avatar slots for you to hot swap between at any time just by pulling on the BodyMod device on your left arm & there is a dedicated area in the Bonelab Hub where you can browse your selection of avatars & change which avatars are in your BodyMod.

As for the visuals, Bonelab isn’t a bad-looking game, but at best, it isn’t much of an improvement over Boneworks & can, at times, feel like a graphical regression. This is most likely a result of Stress Level Zero having to optimize the game to run natively on the Quest 2, as Onward (a multiplayer VR shooter) similarly had to downgrade its graphics on PC in order to facilitate a Quest 2 port with cross-play. It’s worth it so Quest 2 owners can play this game without needing a powerful enough PC, but it’s still worth mentioning.

The last thing that’s worth mentioning is mods. Bonelab heavily encourages you to make & install mods. It is even at the core of the story. But it’s worth noting that at the time of writing, the Marrow SDK hasn’t been finished yet. It’s available to use right now, but key features are missing, subsequently limiting the scope of what you can make right now (especially regarding new maps and/or levels). If you’d like to browse what mods are available before you buy, the official Bonelab mod repository is on Mod.io

Conclusion:

While it sure isn’t for everyone, Bonelab is definitely an experience unlike (almost) anything else you can play in VR at the moment. It takes advantage of the added immersion & motion controls of modern VR headsets to create a gameplay loop that just feels natural once you have overcome the learning curve.

Ratings:

Creative score (story, gameplay, voice acting, art direction): 8.5/10

Technical score (graphics, audio, performance)): 9/10

Business Practices score: 8/10 (SLZ did nothing either offensively bad or amazing on this front)

Overall score (my thoughts on a game’s overall quality, doesn’t consider the business practices unless they are detrimental to the experience): 8/10