It doesn’t help that the game’s morality and narrative presentation make you care so little about your decisions that none of it holds any weight. Yet then the big climax is about how none of that matters and you’re going into space anyway. It’s confusing, to say the least.īiomutant is all about being in balance with nature and exploring what that means. After that, you need to choose some ideal candidates to Adam-and-Eve themselves on a new planet via a space ark that humanity conveniently left behind underneath a tree. Yes, you can skip over six hours or so of content because apparently Biomutant gets bored of itself as well. Then there’s the tribal war over what to do about nature’s decline that becomes so boring that the game even offers the ability to skip the majority of it. First it sounds like you need to track down and kill the Worldeater beasts.

It’s to the point that even Biomutant’s core goal changes repeatedly. And I’m probably still forgetting a few other aspects.

The story is told in medias res and in increasingly forced flashbacks, complicating an otherwise painfully simple narrative about your customizable ronin ferret. It’s a free-aim third-person shooter, lock-on shooter, brawler, CRPG, ARPG, sailing, mech, platforming, open-world, sandbox, post-apocalyptic, Monster Hunter meets Far Cry meets anthropomorphic Fallout 3… blob. If anything, it feels like Biomutant would like nothing more than to be every single game that’s ever existed. This isn’t The Evil Within trying to be every horror game that’s ever existed. It’s not even a simple hodgepodge of a specific genre or style. After pouring through its content for hours upon hours, I couldn’t begin to tell you what it actually wants to be. In fact, I have never played something as utterly, profoundly, jaw-droppingly unfocused as Biomutant. Well you read the headline so you can probably guess.īiomutant lacks that crucial central pillar. Do all these disparate parts add up, or is it just an evolutionary offshoot that won’t make it five inches beyond the gene pool? The question is whether any of that amounts to an enjoyable experience. Each aspect of its design has the sort of personalized touch you normally only see in solo-dev indie projects. Indeed, Biomutant is almost inarguably a game that is everything its developers wanted. I was rooting for it before launch and still curious despite its divisive reception. It’s because of this that everyone I talked to insisted I’d probably be the biggest fan of Biomutant. Longtime readers are aware that I can look past games with considerable flaws, provided there’s a central throughline and a distinctly memorable core experience.

Biomutant narrator voice actor