We’re at the dawn of the next generation of gaming, and that means there are all kinds of new games to look forward to. Boletaria looks better than ever in the Demon’s Souls remake. I expect that Spider-Man: Miles Morales will be solid when it comes to story and gameplay.
But the only game that really has my attention is Bugsnax.
I’m not actually playing Bugsnax on a next-gen console — I preordered it for my PC a while back — but I fell head-over-heels in love with it when it was announced as a PlayStation 5 launch title back in June. Not only did it have an incredibly catchy theme song, but it instantly made me think of some of my all-time favorite games, like Viva Piñata, Slime Rancher, and Pokémon Snap. How could I not be excited?
Those Pokémon Snap similarities aren’t just on the surface either. The Bugsnax development team, Young Horses, actually played Snap and other Pokémon titles as research. The creator of Bugsnax, Phil Tibitoski, expanded on this in a recent interview.
It’s kind of like what if Pokémon, but you could eat Pikachu? … We’ve taken a look at the Pokedex and things like that and we definitely initially played a lot of Pokémon Snap to try and figure out how that might play into what the game is, and that was part of that initial exploration of mechanics. Um, until we realized that being on rails like that kind of sucks now.
I’ve never had any desire to eat Pikachu — or any Pokémon, for that matter — but I really can’t wait to gobble down some Bugsnax. It’s the sort of weird, adorable, addictive game that I can’t get enough of. Even if the other PS5 launch titles wind up dominating the conversation, Bugsnax is the title that I want to talk about.
