Bionic Bay Review

Bionic Bay is a 2D platformer that mixes physics puzzles with fast-paced platforming. It doesn’t lean too hard in either direction, which makes it feel fresh and different. One moment, you’re using your brain to solve a problem; the next, your timing jumps to survive a deadly trap. Bionic Bay is worth your time if you like games that let you mess with physics or enjoy platformers with some thinking involved.

If you enjoy playing around with physics and games or want a solid and fun platformer, Bionic Bay is a gem of a game you don’t want to pass up. It sits between a slower-paced environmental puzzler and a zippy parkour platformer. One of the most impressive aspects of the experience is how engaging the mixture of those two main ingredients is throughout: as a fan of both puzzle games and platformers, you feel delighted on both ends of the spectrum.

That said, Bionic Bay isn’t strictly a puzzle game or a precision platformer (this is not Super Meat Boy). There are plenty of challenging sections, but there’s usually a slower physics-based puzzle around the corner to mix up the pacing.

Freezing time to platform across a series of spinning, briefly saw blades forces you to put on your Meat Boy or Celeste hat, only to require a slower, methodical approach to a seemingly inaccessible cliff minutes later. You never find yourself sitting away from the controller thinking of solutions, though Bionic Bay encourages active play through its dynamic physics engine to solve its problems.

Every object, including most environmental platforms, bends and moves when pressed with enough weight. Your favorite example is the subtle way railing and outcroppings bend when you hang onto an edge. The game gives you some fun abilities to manipulate these environmental objects.

The one you’ll use the most is the swap ability: you tag an object and hit the swap button to switch places with that tagged object. A surprising number of objects can be swapped—from large asteroid-like platforms to small batteries. Playing around with various objects and seeing how they interact with the environment is fun.

The unpredictable fun involved with these interactions hinges on the impressive animations and effects built into the 2D engine. Lasers burn away surfaces, creating individual spark particles, and what the deadly objects do to your character is downright slapstick—your character’s limbs move independently, resulting in hilarious death animations.

There’s meticulous attention to detail regarding how elements like fire, ice, and the like affect objects. One of your favorite demonstrations of these elemental effects is using the swap ability to move a series of rock platforms directly in front of a rotating ice laser, creating a frozen staircase for you to climb. Individual frost particles dust off on the platforms, which goes the extra mile to enhance the game’s 2D presentation.

The game uses elemental effects with your physics-based abilities in many other creative ways, but again, it isn’t all about puzzles. Bionic Bay uses these physics-based tools to create nail-biting platform sequences, using swaps in rapid succession to escape a quickly advancing saw blade narrowly. This deeply satisfies the precision-platformer fan in you, and the fact that the game spaces these challenging moments between methodical puzzles makes you appreciate them all the more.

Platforming feels tight in Bionic Bay. The movement is responsive with quick rolls and precise air control. It’s not as sharp as something like Celeste, mainly due to the character’s floppy limbs, but it’s solid. If you miss a jump, the game often allows you to grab a ledge before you fall, which helps. The level design also spaces out the fast platforming parts between slower puzzle sections, keeping the pace from getting stale.

Speaking of precision, the movement controls are snappy and responsive. Your character turns on a dime, and you can easily adjust movement midair due to the animation of loose limbs. Movement isn’t quite as direct as Mega Man 11 or Celeste, but it’s certainly responsive enough to thread the needle in any situation.

If you narrowly miss a platform, your character will automatically hang on ledges until you climb up or decide to fall downward. There’s also a very speedy roll that can be spammed quickly, unlike the modern Donkey Kong Country games.

Aside from the loose-limb animation occasionally offsetting precision, your only gripe is that the game has no camera control to speak of at all. While the general zoomed-out perspective does a fair job of letting you see around your character, there are still some trial-and-error moments. Sometimes, you don’t know what a platform is and its decoration, especially with how packed the backgrounds can be.

A few more visual cues would have helped. The game is usually good about differentiating foreground from background objects, but you might still die trying to jump on a biomechanical plant due to depth-perception issues.

Thankfully, Bionic Bay makes up for these issues with constant checkpoints and instantly reloads—so even if you mess up, you’re right back in it. Every obstacle has a checkpoint before it that loads you back to your spot instantly. The fast loading and frequent checkpoints lessen the blow of those trial-and-error moments.

Bionic Bay also feels seamless. The levels flow into each other without much of a break, and the game doesn’t make a big deal out of its structure. You won’t find collectibles or alternate paths, but the linear focus works here—you can tell it’s clearly made for replaying with speed in mind. You won’t realize the game has levels until you return to the main menu and see the chapter-select screen.

You’ll know you’ve hit the end of a level when you go through one of the tubes or narrow tunnels, which leads to very brief loading screens. Part of the seamlessness is due to levels carrying over backgrounds and aesthetics into the next area, making the world feel organic and natural without apparent shifts in theme and mechanics.

Despite its linearity, Bionic Bay is still replayable because it’s brilliantly designed for speedrunning. Physics renders most situations highly variable, meaning cheesing certain puzzles is possible. You’ll love how there are various ways to go about a problem, yet it’s not so open-ended that it breaks the game—you still need fundamental platforming skills to accommodate how speedrun-friendly the game is.

There’s even an online time-trial mode with leaderboards and rotating challenges. Bionic Bay Online has a seasonal rotation of time trials through snippets from the game’s levels. It’s a great way to squeeze more replayability out of the game by speedrunning sections and posting results on the leaderboards.

It isn’t the leaderboards or times you’ll remember Bionic Bay for—it’s the unique atmosphere and tone. The developer cited Another World as a key inspiration, and it shows. The atmospheric storytelling is prevalent, though not so overt or “gamey” that it feels forced.

You pick up hints about the setting from the environment and a few scattered data logs, but nothing is pushed on you. Like Limbo and Inside, Bionic Bay lets you piece together what happened using contextual clues and environmental details. There’s nothing too crazy in the environment, but enough subtlety to provide context.

Helping sell the environments is, of course, the meticulous pixel art across every screen. You love the biomechanical designs of the backgrounds, even if they repeat between levels. The creepy sound effects add to the atmosphere, too, though you sometimes wish there was more music to punctuate the ambiance. Some players may feel that sections go on for too long without music. The game takes a Half-Life approach to its music, which can sometimes work but leave the soundscape feeling a tad emptier than you’d like.

All in all, Bionic Bay is a brilliant puzzle platformer. It hits a rare balance between puzzles and fast platforming without feeling split. The swap mechanic gives it a lot of personality, and the physics-based design adds a nice layer of unpredictability. While the lack of camera control and occasional visual clutter hold it back, these issues don’t significantly drag down the experience.