Life, Death, & Bugsnax

[Music] it's june 11th 2020 and sony is hosting a ps5 reveal event an event created to display the future of video games on a next generation console this generation had been praised and hyped up to be the biggest technological leap in the history of consoles during this event they revealed upcoming games for ps5 gran turismo 7 ratchet and clank spider-man sack boy resident evil horizon forbidden west and then sandwiched between absurdly sweaty man the game and demon souls was bug snacks when i saw this trailer i cracked a joke about it being the future of graphics i thought the game looked just okay then i listened closer and realized the song playing in the trailer was made by kirokiro bonito so as any normal person would do with that important information i bought the game as soon as it came out and now after a hundred percenting it i can say bug snacks is a really good game and it took me by surprise it covers a lot of ground in the 12 hours it has to offer and i enjoyed nearly all of those hours i will be spoiling very minor details in the beginning of this video including some character details but nothing to do with the main plot of the game in the later half of the video i will talk about the main story of the game so if you don't want any major spoilers to the story you can just hop out at that point without further ado let's start talking about bug snacks [Music] bug snacks is a game about solving mysteries helping other people and obviously collecting bug snacks these creatures are absurdly charming and cute they pack a lot of personality and calories why is a bunger 30 000 calories one of the best parts of these little snacks is the noises they make they do the pokemon thing where they say their name but it's like cuter and better in every way just listen to this bunger how could you not like bunga after hearing how he sounds like he's just fantastic as many of you probably know though these snacks are a little weird when a grumpus eats a snack a piece of that grumpus's body will turn into that snack this feature is essentially the weirdest dress-up game ever there are so many different snack customizations it's absurd i wasn't very interested in fully snacking out the grumpuses but i did make one character entirely into pickles i also made a grumpus who is voiced by soldier 76 by the way into pepsi man's cousin lecroy man and this guy kind of looks like the watermelon equivalent of the arby's logo okay maybe i did enjoy this feature more than i thought it's pretty fun to goof around with but some of the foods make characters look kind of creepy and yucky bug snacks can be picky little critters they all have things that they like and dislike my favorite example of this is this little chicago dog worm guy and uh yeah they made him dislike ketchup as a chicago dog fan this is one of the best game design choices in the history of video games i will have absolutely no ketchup on my hot dogs and if i had a choice in the matter i would probably make it illegal bug snacks can vary in tons of other ways too some of them fly others burrow underground they can be sticky set you on fire or even freeze you all of these snack related characteristics are essential details when planning out how to capture them and it can get a little tricky to capture these snacks but luckily the player has quite a variety of tools for the job a snack trap sauce slinger lunch pad tripwire gun snack grappler and most importantly the buggy ball look at this little stupid boy stuck in a ball on their own all of these tools are really fun to use but in conjunction they can create some pretty funky ways to grab some tough snacks i was using the lunch pad and the snack trap together pretty often to catch flying bugs the sauce slinger is pretty useful to catch almost any bug snack because most bug snacks like at least one kind of sauce just like in the real world you can cover almost any object in sauce this includes your traps and also the buggy ball and you can use that to guide the bug snacks around sometimes the only way to catch a snack is to have it interact with another one nearby in the desert a lot of them were just casually walking around on fire so i couldn't really pick them up i got around this by leading them over to a pool of water guarded by one of my personal favorite bug snacks sodi now sodi is one of the few bug snacks that passionately hates any and every kind of sauce so i'd cover the flaming snack in any sauce and sodi would just spray it in anger putting out the fire and allowing me to pick up that snack this snack on snack method is also applied to snacks that are too cold as well i didn't realize until pretty late in the game that you could put the tripwire hook on a fire and hit a cold bug snack and it would melt it i thought the tripwire hook would just like break if you put it on fire but now for some reason you can just like set it on fire and it's fine i wouldn't say any of the bug snacks in the game are insanely difficult to catch but they do make the player look around the environment and find the best way to go about capturing them i found it engaging enough to catch all 100 of them it kind of feels like a puzzle each time and i thought it was really clever and fun also all of the bug snacks that you collect throughout the game show up on the loading screen so as you start to collect more bug snacks your loading screen gets more variety i really like this use of down time it's a really great way to motivate the player to catch more and also show them all the progress they made typically the player is sent out on a hunt by one of the residents of snacktooth island there's at least a dozen grumpuses to interact with all of these characters are pretty different and a lot of them don't really get along early on there's a dispute between gramble and wambus now gramble is a snack pacifist and he raises snacks like they're his sweet little baby bug children wambus thinks that's dumb and bad and often complains about that and how gramble is wasting their food these conflicts aren't that deep or complicated but they fit the game pretty well gramble's just a bug lover and he doesn't really want to eat snacks and wambus is just a stubborn dumb boy who doesn't understand that perspective and there's other examples of this throughout the game i found most of the characters pretty enjoyable to chat with but wow i really couldn't stand shelda she's essentially just the gwyneth paltrow of this game it is completely miserable to listen to her speak for more than 15 seconds other than sheldo all of these characters have legitimate reasons for why they act a certain way bramble doesn't really have a family anymore for some unknown reason so he desires to make one himself by adopting way too many bugs befeka is a drama obsessed clown that won't really get along with anyone because she was hurt by shitty friends in the past i'm sure at this point you're thinking wow these are kinda sad stories for a goofy looking muppet game and yeah i thought the same thing too one of the characters that genuinely surprised me was egabel who you hear from early on through a videotape she talks about dealing with self-esteem issues and depression and i really wasn't expecting a character to talk about issues like depression for a game with such a bright and cheery exterior it is not afraid to dip its toes into sadder topics and you'd think stories or characters like this would feel out of place but they never really do and props to the people who wrote this for getting this dissonance so well the game never feels like it covers these sad topics in grueling detail it tackles them briefly and then carries on with the goofy humor and main plot the writing for bug snacks really fits the game a lot better than their previous game octodad okay so quick recap we know that bug snacks are charming and fun to hunt and we also know that the characters in the game are all pretty cool and likable but not sheldon sheldon sucks i think the next thing to cover would probably be the world map snacktooth island isn't a boundary pushing 10 million miles of jaw-dropping terrain to explore but it isn't a tiny baby island either right in the center of the island is snacksberg this is the town where all of the grumpuses gather but when you first arrive it's not looking so great it's filled with abandoned houses and very dreary colors but as you progress through the game the town begins to get greener and buildings start to get fixed up there's also tons of small cute details littered around the town too my personal favorite is the grumford and sons record in wiggles house and uh also this cool ass frog guy i really like the frog guy oh and you can pet bug snacks at gramble's barn which is an essential feature to the bug snacks experience outside of snacksburg there are eight different areas to explore and find new bug snacks in my favorites are frosted peak and flavor falls and my least favorite was probably sizzling sands it wasn't even that bad or anything it just was a little flat and uninteresting the pizza pyramid was pretty sick though exploring snacktooth island reminds me of exploring the map in slime rancher the style is very similar and so is the size of the areas i do think it would have been pretty cool to have a cave biome on the island to explore maybe use the tripwire to light up flares while exploring it or something like that i don't know overall i'd say the island's pretty cool lots of areas to explore a couple secrets around the map here and there and there's a decent variety in biomes too i didn't expect this but bug snacks actually has quite a few side quests in most games i don't really like doing side quests most of the time they're typically just tedious filler placed around the map to pad things out and make the game longer to my surprise though i completed all of them in bug snacks throughout the game they provide quite the variety of quests and i enjoyed most of them there are some duds though especially sheldo's side quests i know it sounds like i'm just hating on this person but they were just not fun at all she just sends you on these bug snack hunts where you have to capture two or three from a bunch of different areas across the entire island i spent more time running around the map than actually catching the bug snacks and that felt kind of lame tiffany probably had my favorite side quests in the game you and her go explore ancient ruins and learn more about the history behind snacktooth island and this made tiffany one of my favorite characters just because i enjoyed her side quest so much befica also had some interesting side quests i didn't enjoy them as much but they're kind of weird you often have to go snoop on people around town and learn their secrets and tell them to bethica one of them tasked the player with finding out what wambus does at midnight so you sleep until midnight wake up and when you go to stalk him in the middle of the night like anyone casually does you find out that he spends his time talking to a cactus dressed up like his wife who left him which is kind of an equally amusing and depressing thing to discover i just kind of felt bad for him but befika got a laugh out of it weirdly enough there's four optional boss fights that are side quests and all of them are really great they're all pretty unique and engaging to fight i'd say my least favorite was probably the sushi dragon that was kind of a pain in the ass but it was fun still alright i'm gonna talk about the main story now i've tried my best to avoid spoiling any of it before this but i'm just gonna go right into spoilers in this section so if you don't want any of the main story spoiled thanks for watching this far and uh bye-bye bug snacks main story puts you in the shoes of a journalist who has come to snacktooth island to learn more about bug snacks and also interview lizbert megafig who recently went missing the majority of the main quest task you with gathering up grumpuses and interviewing them this is all done to collect more information on the location of lizburg as you return all of the grumpuses to snacksburg they all start to get along more eventually you reach an area on the map called frosted peak where you meet lizbert's partner who also went missing eggabel she has lost track of lisber in an avalanche and thinks that her partner may be trapped behind a locked door in the side of the mountaintop so you aggabel and philbo all work together to eventually open this door once the door opens you all walk through and then out of nowhere the ground shatters below you all as you dive into the under snacks and this is where the game decides to hit you with some messed up the under snacks is a dark winding system of tunnels with a really off-putting reddish tint the walls of these caves consist of a variety of foods merged together and it looks terrible it almost feels like walking inside a landfill everything is just very unpleasant and weirdly enough kind of flesh-like overall it's just pretty gross you meet up with filbo and briefly walk through these tunnels searching for egabel then you encounter a large room where liz burt resides but uh lizbert's not looking so great in fact she looks creepy as and it's here that the player finally gets to interview lizburg and the truth of bug snacks and snacktooth island is revealed and that truth is bug snacks are actually deceitful parasites that prey on the insecurities of all living things around them slowly consuming them until they lose control and consciousness once they're completely consumed they add on to the endless pile of bug snacks that makes up snacktooth island lizbert says she's been fighting for control while being endlessly force-fed bug snacks she's struggling to keep control of these parasites and tells the player to gather everyone on the island and leave egabel then falls into the room and just bolts into lizburt and becomes one with the pizza food dragon you and filbo leave them behind and return to snacksburg to rescue your friends and leave the island after fighting off waves of bug snacks you eventually leave the island in the airship you arrived in this airship then lands on a beach nearby with snacktooth island smoldering in the distance you and philbo return to your boss and lie about bug snacks saying that they're a hoax trying to protect people from visiting the island you then get fired help filbo run for mayor for some reason and then the credits roll playing kirokiro benito's song for the game and this is the point where i realized that the song actually had a double meaning in one of the lines come to snacktooth island and discover it's bug snacks that's some pretty clever man during the final fight at snacksburg if all of the grumpuses survive you get a little extra after credits piece of dialogue alright so i don't know about you but i didn't expect any of this at all not a single cell in my body was like yeah this game's just gonna get messed up i saw that some people online expected it but i was so confident that it wouldn't it's a cute little kids game right has a few moody or serious portions nothing that dark but no the game just straight up tells you the entire time you thought you were helping your friends you were actually feeding them insidious all-consuming parasites so that's pretty cute and heartwarming i just wanted to make a lacroix boy and not feel guilty about it and i fed those grumpuses man they were fully transformed into bug snacks i even made gramble eat them while he was sleepwalking because i wanted an achievement so what do i think of the ending well i really love when games do this kind of thing i think it's pretty easy to compare this game's story to earthbound both of them are bright childish and goofy but in the end things just get real messed up and it's really hard to deny how memorable stories like this can be i gotta say though as much as i enjoyed the end of this game and i think it's good i really think it could have been more impactful if they expanded the under snacks portion of the game allow the player to explore more of these twisted and dark caverns alone searching for your friends as tension builds it would have been such a great build up and made things much more impactful and satisfying and unsettling i think the pacing at the end of the game should have been a lot slower but it was more like a full-on sprint i assume this was done to fit the urgency of the situation you're in but i really wish the game threw this out the window and spent more time exploring this darker side to the story regardless the ending still made its impact and i really enjoyed the game for what it had to offer i did not expect a story like that exploring characters who all struggle with personal issues made the story seem like it was gonna go somewhere else like you were gonna get all your friends together and have one big party at the end with lizburt and it was gonna be a happy good ending and then right as you think you're finally getting towards that ending they pull a rug right out under you it gets dark and things you did for everyone have a completely different meaning than they did before like i said previously when i first saw bug snacks i didn't think it would be that interesting of a game the characters didn't seem that interesting during the trailer and i thought the game was just gonna be like snack pokemon but it ended up being a lot more eventful than my prediction bug snacks is a cheery game that plays with darker themes a little bit before just diving headfirst into it it has subtle hints of something being a little off or weird but never enough to convince you it's going full creepy it's constantly juggling absurdity adorableness humor and moody themes throughout the game at one moment you'll be talking with egabel as she frantically tries everything she can to rescue her significant other who went missing in an avalanche and then right after that you'll be catching a creature called a scoopy banoopie who sounds like this scoop scoop scoop scoops and for some reason that contrast just fits the game perfectly catching bug snacks had way more depth to it than i could have predicted and well it's not five dimensional chess complicated it's enough to keep you engaged while doing it when i first planned to make a bug snacks video i was gonna make a little gameplay thing where i was goofing around for a few hours and that was it but i just ended up really invested in it i enjoyed it so much that i wanted to make this video instead bug snacks ended up being one of the most interesting games that came out this year and i never thought i'd say that about a game from the team that made the funny octopus dad game young horses really nailed it on this game and it feels like a huge step in a really exciting direction whether it's bug snacks related or not i'm looking forward to what they make in the future i also really hope they release a cinesnail plush because i need it i really need it please make it please make the plush if you like bugs and video games i have a series on deep rock galactic you could check out too and thanks for watching my video rock and stone [Music] [Music]

Channel: sniss

Views: 44,124

Keywords: Bugsnax, Sniss, Indie Games, Bunger, Scoopy Banoopy, Cinnasnail, Shelda Sucks

Id: 9B3zy4y-c54

Length: 20min 13sec (1213 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 04 2021