I try very hard to avoid using “trial and error” as a major critique when talking about video games. Because inherently, all video games are trial and error if there is any difficulty whatsoever attached to them. When you play a difficult action game where you need to learn enemy attack patterns, there is an element of trial and error there. When you play any puzzle game, there is going to be some tinkering and failures to solve the puzzle before you eventually reach the solution.
Trial and error isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it’s often a necessary facet of the fun in any game. Encountering a difficult obstacle and overcoming it is a big reason why video games are great. When someone dismisses a game as “trial and error,” they aren’t really telling you why the game isn’t hitting for them. Because I guarantee they like “trial and error” in a different game.
Instead, there are likely two other things at play when someone says this. First off, they probably think that the game is unfair. It is often a situation where the game attempts to trick you instead of outright challenging you. This can get annoying, because even in difficult video games, there’s usually at least a small chance that you beat that nasty boss on the first try, or that the tricky puzzle somehow clicks with you and you solve it right away. A game that feels “unfair” doesn’t give you this possibility most of the time.
Secondly, it likely just means that they don’t really enjoy the gameplay mechanics all that much. If I’m facing off with something difficult in a game, but the game feels great to play, I’m always going to be more forgiving, even if it’s kicking my ass, and even if it’s occasionally unfair while doing so.
I say all this to say that I recently played Bionic Bay, a pretty well rated puzzle platformer with some interesting ideas and absolutely wacky physics. Unfortunately, almost all of the challenge from the game is more unfair than interesting. And the core platforming and simple puzzle design wasn’t enough to keep me engaged for much more than short stretches.
That was a lot of work to say that it feels kind of trial and error! I get why reviewers like that term now.
Death Is Tragic, But It Can Occasionally Be Hilarious #Grief
You play Bionic Bay as a scientist who is trying to escape some sort of fucked up “ancient biomechanical world” in order to find his way home or something. I only know that because of the Steam description. The little bit of occasional text that the game gives you is almost impossible to read on the Steam Deck. The point is that you get a device that gives you a few special abilities, and you use those abilities to try and escape the world. In addition, this device seems to give you some incredible jumping abilities. Thus, the device sets it up where you will do some platforming and some puzzle solving in order to get through each area.
Of the puzzling and the platforming, I found the platforming to be the bigger strength in Bionic Bay, even though I did have some issues with it. Simply, it is really weird, but it mostly works.
The main thing that sets Bionic Bay’s platforming apart is that it has almost none of the normal abilities that you’d expect from a game like this. There is no double jump or air dash here. Instead, it’s all about diving and rolling.
Each time you have to jump from one spot to another, you have a few options. You can do a normal jump, which is somewhat floaty, and thus can get you a decent distance on its own. You can also do a roll before you jump, which will cause you to jump further. You can also use this same roll to duck under dangerous objects in other spots. Finally, to jump the absolute furthest, you can do a roll before jumping, jump, and then dive mid-air.
This gets pretty wild. It’s a weird mechanic that never stops being really odd throughout the roughly four hours it took me to beat the game. But it controls well, and it’s just kind of hilarious. Seeing your character awkwardly dive into a ledge instead of gracefully leaping and gliding never gets old.
As I said, the game is a bit floaty. This seems to be by design, as there are some levels that take place in higher gravity where the jumping feels heavier. Luckily, I didn’t feel like the jumps in the game required tons of precision for the most part thanks to some skills that you get, and the fact that ledge grabs seem really generous, but there were a few sections where I wished things were a bit more precise. The dive mechanic is so awkward and different that there are many jumps that I succeeded on where I felt like I shouldn’t have, and other moments where I thought I should have made a jump but didn’t.
The game also has some absolutely hysterical physics that add to the fun. There are rag doll type physics that come into play when you miss or sometimes even hit a jump. If you miss, you’ll often land on something and flop around in funny ways as you die. The physics in the game also seem to make it so even small changes to how you land can drastically change how you flop around. Nothing feels particularly “scripted” here.
This even goes for the physics in the game’s environments sometimes. Bionic Bay has a lot of challenges where you will do things like navigating through bouncing laser balls as an example. It was fascinating how differently this could go every single time. Things don’t bounce the exact same way or spin perfectly every time in this game. Little things can alter objects a fair bit. Many times when I died in certain areas, my next attempt at the same challenge would look very different. I’d try to take the path that got me to the area where I died, and all of a sudden, one of those bouncing balls hit something differently than last time and ended up in my way. It’s really cool in some respects, but it can also be occasionally frustrating when the physics make a challenge considerably different from the last time you attempted it. There are a few times where I felt like the physics turned an area from difficult to impossible, and I would have to die and “reroll” essentially to get a better result.
Luckily, that was a relatively rare issue. The much more frustrating elements of Bionic Bay are the confusing environments and the constant barrage of unfair trial and error challenges.
As you can see with the screenshots, Bionic Bay is a very dark game visually. The environments are dark, the platforms are dark, and your character often looks like a silhouette. In addition to this, the game has you going in every single direction as the game goes along. In some levels, you are going right, which is the pretty standard direction for a lot of linear 2D platformers. However, sometimes you will go up, sometimes you will go down, and sometimes you will go left. This means that you always have to be on the lookout to figure out which way the game wants you to go next. This can be a bit disorienting when juxtaposed with the dark levels.
But it gets even worse because the backgrounds in the game can also be quite dark and often blend right in with the environments. There are so many times when I jumped to a platform thinking it may be where I need to go next, but it turned out it was actually part of the background or even the foreground. And the game doesn’t give you any arrows or hints as to where to go next. Finding where to jump to next was often more challenging than the actual jumps in Bionic Bay.
This is also a problem with the explosives in the game. Bionic Bay is chock-full of explosives, which can lead to hilarious deaths with the aforementioned physics. Unfortunately, the hilarity dies down a bit when you keep dying from explosives that you wouldn’t notice unless you were really looking closely at the environments.
This is because, unlike almost every other game on the planet, Bionic Bay does not super clearly mark explosive items. With the silhouette art style, they couldn’t mark all of their explosive items red like you would generally expect. Explosive items tend to just have these little antennas on them. And they are incredibly easy to miss. I can’t tell you how many times I jumped to a platform and didn’t realize that the items were explosive because they popped up later in my jump, and I couldn’t fully see them. It’s really annoying and a constant problem throughout the game.
This is just one element of the “trial and error” portions of the game that I really didn’t enjoy. As you navigate the world, traps will randomly activate with next to no notice. Explosive barrels will be placed right in spots where you are almost sure to land when you are jumping down off screen. Danger is around every corner, but not the fun kind of danger. It’s the dreaded trial and error type of danger. I feel like 50% of my deaths in the game were from things that I was almost assuredly not going to be able to avoid without knowing that they were coming.
The good news is that Bionic Bay is incredibly generous with its checkpoints. There are very few deaths in the game where I didn’t spawn a few seconds away from where I died. So, some of these dumb deaths can almost be written off as funny gags, but it happens so often that it gets genuinely annoying after a while. The combination of these deaths with the general struggle to figure out where the hell to go next was always a gnawing annoyance in-between some of the fun.
OK, Here’s The Pitch. We Have This Really Cool Idea For a Mechanic. Let’s Wait Until The End Of The Game And Use it On One Level. #Genius
Similarly, the puzzles also have moments of brilliance compounded by errors that hold them back from reaching their fullest potential.
You get two main abilities in Bionic Bay. One that allows you to switch places with an item you touched, and another that slows down time.
Both of these skills are pretty cool in theory. But I found that they mostly get used in the simplest ways possible. The “switch” skill gets used roughly the same way throughout the entire game. Touch an item, and then switch places with it to use it as a platform, or use it to stop things like a fan from moving, or to stop a laser’s path so it can’t kill you. It’s almost all things like that. Sometimes, these tasks actually get quite annoying as well. The game has several spots where it wants you to stack several containers in order to reach a platform that is higher up. But because of the physics in the game, it’s pretty easy for a stack of containers to fall. Yes, there is a strategy in stacking the containers in a stable way, but it’s a tedious and annoying task, and there are several moments like this throughout the game.
Meanwhile, the slow motion skill is also used about as you’d expect. The game throws hectic situations at you, but you can slow down time, and suddenly, that fan that was going super fast can be jumped on, those crazy lazers can never avoided, etc.
This can be entertaining as a platforming challenge aspect of the game. The slow motion is time-limited, so you need to navigate through these areas as quickly as possible. So I ended up enjoying this skill more than the switching skill, but I’d also say it is mostly used in similar and slightly uninteresting ways throughout the game.
For whatever reason, these skills are completely separated from each other for most of the adventure. Finally, in the last 1/3rd of the game or so, you can use both. The game does give you a few interesting puzzles once they allow you to use both skills. For example, there are puzzles where you need to jump up, switch places with a container, and then use slow motion to use that container in mid-air as a platform. But they don’t go much further than that with combining the skills.
Finally, in the second to last level of the game, Bionic Bay unveils an ability where you can literally flip the screen in any way you want. So if you see some pipes above you, you can flip the screen, and suddenly upside down is right side up. You can also flip the screen horizontally. This level is unbelievably creative and uses the skill in some really smart and cool ways that combine both platforming and puzzle solving. I imagine that designing levels around this skill is really labor intensive, but it almost left me mad that the game had such a cool idea and used it in such a limited way. If this skill was present throughout the game, I could almost guarantee I would have liked the game more. But sadly, it mostly showcased how much untapped potential there was in Bionic Bay.
If You Think About It, Video Game Development Is Basically A Big Game Of Trial And Error #Whoa
And I think that is the biggest story of Bionic Bay for me. There is tons of potential here. I can see why a lot of critics love the game because there are some genuinely cool and interesting ideas here. It’s unique, it’s kind of funny in unhinged ways, and there are some really high highs.
But for every great moment, there were often two that kind of annoyed me. And every decent idea seems to mostly get run into the ground, even within a short-ish 4 hour journey. I think Bionic Bay has all the tools to be a fantastic game, but it just wasn’t quite there for me. Perhaps if we view this game as a “trial and error” type of attempt at game development, then maybe Bionic Bay 2 can be the game where the developers reach all of the potential that I think they have.
Score: 6.0/10
Big Nerd Gaming 
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