Biomutant Live Review, Part Two - “Critical Reception” & Open Worlds

Well, turns out Biomutant is exactly the right kind of game to give this type of different review structure a go, huh.

It's fair to say the reaction to Biomutant has been fairly mixed across games media as a whole. Part One of this series doesn’t seem to be too far off - the narrator is a pain point for many, for example. Reviews centre on a bloat of systems, technical issues, a lacklustre story and a combat system that is so-so. Fair criticisms, but also a perfect example of why this type of game isn’t suited to the cramming-for-launch-day process.

Before we get too far into this, I want to be upfront - all of the reviewers views and opinions are 100% valid, and anyone thinking that yelling at the people doing that work can fuck right off. You can disagree with a reviewer - this is a good thing, there are many people out there with varying views of the world! - but that in no way invalidates their experiences. Here I want to critique the system, not the people suffering from it. We clear? Good.

After hitting about 20 hours of play time, I’m coming to realise that the way I’m playing through Biomutant is quite different to what’s normal for a AAA review situation. Part of that is this expectation to run what is perceived as a standardised structure - finish the main story, consume enough of the side content to get an idea of it, dabble in the systems to see what works and what doesn’t - in order to have a holistic view of “what the game is” for a review.

This style of reviewing I think comes from an era of much more linear experiences, traced back through not just older video games, but also from other passive media. Almost everything we experience is done through a pretty linear progression, older games included. When watching a 12 episode TV series, you aren’t going to watch episodes 1 through 4, skip to 9-11, dip partially into 5-6 before knocking 12 out (while missing 7-8 entirely) for example, because that would be absurd.

As games have evolved and expanded in modes of play, the ways in which they are played has also changed. Particularly those that allow the freedom to do any number of activities in any given play session.

Most of the past 15 hours I’ve spent in Biomutant has been wandering around and exploring, completely ignoring any quest markers, the overarching goals of the game long forgotten. Picking through the remnants of past civilisation, finding my own groove with the combat encounters, building out bits and pieces of equipment. There’s very much an “ooh, what’s over there?” quality that is guiding me around the world, reminiscent of Breath of the Wild.

The one thing I haven’t seen come up in many reviews, if at all, is this world design. Part of that is how I’m playing - the removal of the compass and quest markers, along with the narrator. Allowing myself to be guided by feel, rather than an arrow. You can remove all these in other games and still have a bad open world, but Biomutant thankfully is an interesting place to explore first, a place for ticking off checkboxes second. Even though that is very much present, it’s able to be hidden away enough that it can be avoided.

I think it’s largely to do with the fact that areas on the map don’t have "percent completed" bars - instead, each little area has a smaller checklist of things to do in it. That tiny shift in completionist sensibilities make any given area much more manageable, and less like a drag. Also, because there’s literally hundreds of these areas, the pressure to tick everything off is obfuscated enough that it translates to a lesser importance.

It’s a tough act to balance, and generally not one open world games do very well. Ubi-world games can be incredibly overwhelming with all their Stuff™, whereas something like Breath of the Wild, as much as I believe it moves in the right direction, is knocked by some for being sparse. Biomutant mostly pulls off the cake and eat it too scenario, offering up the checklisting and map pointers while simultaneously allowing wonder-based exploration be an acceptable way to play.

For a little while, I switched my mode of play from this exploration based “see what I can find” to “lets check out these quests”. Here, I hit a mass of friction and annoyance.

Engaging with the characters and writing is immediately painful. There’s this set of side characters that could be incredible, with their own perspectives on what is worth doing at the end of the world, that is so unfortunately obfuscated behind second hand translation and uninteresting proper nouns. Because for as silent as you can make the narrator, the dialogue is still translated through his written voice.

The morality system is similarly rote. Thanks to the cartoony nature of your conscience - the light and dark aura that determines what impact you have on the world - along with the simplistic number system determining what abilities you can unlock, there is extremely little impact on the player emotionally when the system is engaged with.

One of the choices you can make is whether to feed homeless people or burn the food, and while I am playing a traditionally “good” character, I set one alight because I needed dark aura points to unlock skills (I did feel a little bad about it, but not enough that I remembered five minutes later). I’ve resigned myself to being the wanderer that does Good Deeds, but kills baby fox creatures I come across to get to that 30 dark aura score.

As a side note, I don’t know why, but it’s very funny to me that the signature Palpatine “shoot lightning from your fingertips” power is the top-tier "Light Side" ability.

Finally, when completing the first arc of taking down all the Jagni tribe fortresses (which is quite fun actually, as each fortress has a different way of going about taking them down) your fearless leader specifically asks you to “do as little damage as possible”, because we’re the good guys. You proceed to set the fort on fire multiple times. The morality of the game and the childish wackiness of it’s dialogue just do not gel at all.

After that complete tonal whiplash, I went back to doing what made the game fun. I figured out how to unlock the mech and scoured the Deadzone. I’ve seen probably a third of the map, have defeated exactly zero of the major bosses and am doing nothing to save/destroy the Tree Of Life. Playing this game traditionally, it’s easy to see how it would be middling at best. Playing things my own way instead, I’ve found a game I’m enjoying immensely.

This is a thought that has been nagging at the back of my mind for a while now, and why I wanted to approach Biomutant differently. I didn’t play Days Gone because I’m not overly a big zombie fan, but I wonder if that game hit the same type of wall with the dissonance between reviews and the audience that found joy in that game. I don’t know if the traditional structure works anymore, in particular when it comes to these larger, more free form experiences.

At this point, I’m going to keep playing. The funny thing is, I don’t even know if I’ll end up “finishing” the game, insofar as completing quest lines and saving/destroying the day. I’ve already got gotten 20 hours of a mostly great time, and it’ll probably be 40-60 before I see the four corners of the world.

Maybe that’s enough. Maybe unstructured play suits these expansive worlds. Maybe they don’t even have to have big important world shattering storylines. Maybe world building, environmental storytelling and a few characters with their own small localised problems is all we need.