A 2D platformer whose inspirations include Limbo, Dark Souls, and Portal is one of the most inventive, and difficult, games of the year.
In the formative years of video games, when you had to put a coin in a slot to play them, everything was brutally difficult. Not necessarily to the point of being unfair – manufacturers didn’t want you to feel as though you’d been fleeced when you died – but tricky enough that a steady flow of coins would be needed from all but the most accomplished players.
When home consoles first emerged the same philosophy continued, partly because it was before the era of save points, so every time you started up a game it was from the very beginning. After the advent of memory cards, hard drives, and cloud saves, video games became a more mainstream hobby, and developers deliberately made them more accessible to appeal to audiences unused to being digitally brutalised for fun.
Because history is cyclical, and too much of a good thing tends to get boring, over the past decade there’s been a move back to games that offer a far greater degree of challenge. Roguelikes are one indicator that difficulty is back in fashion, but it’s FromSoftware’s Soulsborne games that have been at the forefront of the movement to stop mollycoddling players, instead treating them like adults – albeit adults in a boot camp built to make them better players.
Bionic Bay doesn’t look or sound like a From game, but it’s inspired by the same ethos of honest yet unforgiving challenge. It’s a sinister-looking, side-scrolling platformer that’s immediately reminiscent of games such as Limbo and Inside. Like its inspirations, Bionic Bay is a game of few words, preferring to let its environment tell you most of the things you need to know about both its story and the mechanics you can harness to make your way through its gargantuan, bio-mechanical landscapes.
Your set of moves – a dash, jump, and roll – can be put together in various combinations to bridge gaps that look unachievable and make precision jumps through gaps so tight you’re initially convinced you’ve got the wrong idea about where you’re supposed to be going. You also get given a teleporter that you can attach to objects and instantly swap places with them.
That easy-to-understand mechanic is soon put to increasingly complex use, from allowing you to make your way across even larger chasms, by beaming islands into the right place to hop across, to building – and then moving – barriers that prevent you from being vaporised by scanning laser beams. There are sections where you can slow down time for a few seconds, or punch objects with disproportionate force, and that’s all in the opening few hours.
Each new ability is carefully introduced, getting you used to how it works before it’s riffed on to produce brief but absurdly complex set pieces that you’ll need to retry dozens of times before finally making a run to the next checkpoint. Many of those are in-game seconds apart but can require many minutes of repeatedly dying before you have sufficient skill to complete them in the requisite single take.
Checkpoints are fortunately generous, or at least they start off that way. As you get further into the game you increasingly come across situations that at first seem completely impossible, their difficulty so extreme that no human could be expected to exhibit that level of precision and timing, let alone as part of a long sequence of moves, failure in any one of which causes instant death.
Part of Bionic Bay’s magic is that it’s not only happy to do this but does it regularly. That means you become accustomed to sections that initially seem like dead ends, but over the course of numerous attempts become almost second nature, so what was once an implausible dream becomes something that, given a couple retries, you can do relatively easily. The game trains you to be a better player without the frippery of power-ups or extended energy bars.
Bionic Bay is entirely built around realistic physics, so gravity works, explosions send loose pieces of scenery flying, and momentum is conserved when you use your teleporter, leading to 2D Portal-style hijinks. An unanticipated side effect of that is that your tiny hero’s motion around the screen has something indefinably Muppet-esque about it. It prevents the gargantuan, broken industrial backdrops from feeling too bleak, and infuses the whole thing with an odd sense of jollity.
His ragdoll physics also make many of your frequent, accidental deaths comical, as do the sound effects as he’s crushed or seared, the cheerful squelches and singeing noises adding character despite the character’s minuscule onscreen stature. But that’s all just window dressing for the succession of elegantly designed and slightly knockabout micro-puzzles, to be unpicked as you get deeper into its half-lit biomes.
Bionic Bay delivers merciless lessons in dexterity and timing, continually pushing you towards greater achievements in platforming perfection. It Impresses with the ingenuity of it challenges and its refusal to recycle ideas makes every level its own unique conundrum. If you enjoy uncompromising games, that are also imaginative and inventive, then this is going to go down as one of the best experiences of 2025.
Bionic Bay review summary
In Short: A fast-moving and savagely difficult 2D platformer that draws equal inspiration from Limbo and Soulsborne games, with its own restless sense of invention that never falls short.
Pros: Ultra-tight controls and a dedication to preserving – and playing with – the laws of physics. Glorious, silhouetted landscapes and a difficulty level that is challenging but never unfair.
Cons: Well-judged or not the difficultly level will be too much for some. Visuals can be a little too dour at times.
Score: 9/10
Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed) and PC
Price: TBA
Publisher: Kepler Interactive
Developer: Mureena and Psychoflow Studio
Release Date: 17th April 2025
Age Rating: 12
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