Bionic Bay PS5 Review. An essential part of my gaming regimen is always ensuring I keep some smaller, more “video game” type offerings installed on my PS5 at all times. With my go-to games always being more narrative heavy titles, it can quite often be easy to run into gaming burnout.This is where these smaller games come in – video game palate cleansers if you will.
Bionic Bay, a co-developed indie platformer from Mureena and Psychoflow Studios fits the bill here as the perfect type of game to be utilised in this vein.
Bionic Bay Review (PS5) – Precision Pixel Platforming
Mysterious World
Playing as a scientist you find yourself trapped in a strange world following an incident at a research lab. This mysterious bio-mechanical place is filled with hazards that you must navigate if you are to uncover the secrets that lie within and escape this ancient world.
The game guiding you is kept to a minimum, allowing for experimentation to figure out what is good to do and what’s not. Sharp things are bad, things that go boom are bad, falling from heights is bad, but it is not always so obvious. Trial and error promotes the development of your knowledge, skills and learning the limitations of your character.
Nicely paced across the levels is the granting of new abilities and gameplay mechanics. These being aptly spread out further feeds into the learning and before long you will be mixing abilities to your hearts content bringing constant dopamine hits as your previous efforts begin to pay dividends.
Physics, Precision & Parkour
Being a huge Abe’s Oddysee fan the gameplay here immediately gave me some nostalgia for speed running through the levels in Scrabania and Paramonia. Precision timing of jumps between exploding hazards and barely surviving some insane sequence of things that want to kill you just feels so good.
Bionic Bay’s main ability is being able to swap places with objects in the world. This opens up some fun puzzle elements and paired with the physics of the world gives the player some extra things to think about. Care must be taken or you can quickly be crushed by a heavy object as a consequence of your choice of object to swap with.
Swapping is simply done by tagging the object you want to swap with then hitting L1 on the DualSense. The controls are fully customisable and I found changing the swap to R2 gave a more comfortable feel. Speaking of the DualSense it would be nice to have some use of haptics, adaptive triggers and the controller speaker to further enhance the gameplay.
The correct swapping of objects can open up new paths for progress, increase the distances you can jump across or even protect you from incoming projectiles or hazards.
Keeping things moving along nicely the game does’t hold you up too long when you do die thanks to swift respawning and the generous checkpoints throughout.
Atmosphere
The world that has been crafted here in Bionic Bay is moody and atmospheric. Its use of parallax backgrounds add depth to the environments while the presentation of highly contrasted vibrant colours against deep blacks really sells the atmosphere. Being paired up with some excellent environmental sound design delivers a world you really feel lost in.
Music is kept to an absolute minimum which adds to the vibe of being stranded in a mysterious place. The echo of heavy mechanical machines grinding give an eerie sense to your platforming endeavours.
If you are in the market for a game that is easy to pick up and play while also offering challenge should you push on further into the game then definitely give Bionic Bay a look. Similarly if you are looking for a game to wind down from between bigger titles then this is a great fit. If you are on PS Plus Premium you can take advantage of a one-hour game trial right now.
Bionic Bay is out now on PS5 and PC.
Review code kindly provided by publisher.