Yuuuup, talkin' 'bout Bugsnax this week. The sophomore release from Young Horses, they of Octodad fame, Bugsnax puts you in the... well, the Grumpuses don't really wear shoes, but you occupy the role of a journalist fond of cryptids that is encouraged by a prominent explorer, Lizbert Megafig, to visit her expedition on Snaktooth Island: home to a miraculous menagerie of half-bug, half-snack creatures that may be the discovery of the century. Once you reach Snaktooth, however, you find that Lizbert is missing, her retinue spread across the island due to personal grudges, and that regular earthquakes threaten what little stability the place has. But the Bugsnax turn out to be real after all, and possessed of many strange properties that the player learns about as they continue to explore each corner of the island and interview its stir crazy residents for clues behind Lizbert's disappearance.

It's a little tough to categorize Bugsnax in gameplay terms, but it's close to Octodad in that there's a pretty hostile physics system for you to overcome in order to solve a series of puzzles relating to catching these elusive titular creatures. I might also suggest some Ape Escape DNA found its way in here too: you acquire many gadgets as you play and they all serve to capture Bugsnax that may have eluded your grasp so far either because they were too high up, too cautious of your presence, too big for your snare trap to capture, or simply too aggressive to handle. As you explore each of the game's many biomes, you're tasked with using your head to figure out the best way to sweep up the Bugsnax you need: for some it's as simple as waiting until they enter the range of the snare trap when you're out of sight, but others might require you use two or three gadgets in tandem to stun them long enough to be captured. If they're on fire, for instance, you need to determine how to put them out first because otherwise you'll just set yourself aflame. If they're flying, you need to figure out how to entice them down (or send something up to knock them out of the sky). Each of the game's 100+ Bugsnax have distinct behaviors and properties, and even if some are essentially palette swaps they might still require a different approach compared to their genetic cousins. Fortunately, you have a scanning device that provides clues as to how you might corner your prey with enough effort.

The reason you're catching these Bugsnax is to help the other Grumpuses on the island, all of whom followed Lizbert either out of loyalty or for some personal quest for fame and fortune or because they had nowhere else to go. They'll first require you to do them a favor before they'll deign to return to the hub village of Snaxburg after which they'll continue to offer you work in the form of side-quests. Between the main quest of bringing everyone back to Snaxburg, the individual side-quest chains, and an ever-repopulating set of bonus objectives provided to you by your mailbox, the game always offers plenty of tasks to do (though they all invariably involve capturing Bugsnax) and there's a significant amount of content and places to poke around in. I was honestly impressed with the legs this game has: I think I would've been satisfied with a third of the content from an Indie game, but Bugsnax really goes above and beyond without any of it feeling like unnecessary padding (the mail mini-quests do get a bit ridiculous but those are almost purely optional and only serve to give you new furniture for your hut in Snaxburg, which honestly is enough incentive for me).

The big downside to Bugsnax is, unsurprisingly, the same issue that plagued Octodad: as solutions to so many of the puzzles require a fickle physics engine to play nice for five seconds it often feels like you're fighting against the current to make things happen the way you want them to. Equipment randomly explodes (all your gadgets respawn after a few seconds, but as stun durations are a thing even a few seconds are vital) or the Bugsnax will start fighting amongst themselves and become nigh impossible to wrangle properly or you'll use up all your precious sauce (it grows on plants and used as bait in many cases) trying to ensnare a particularly obstinate Bugsnax and be forced to wander off to find more. The game does mitigate these frustrations with plenty of quality-of-life features: there's a day/night cycle you can skip ahead easily enough, there's instant fast travel, there's no health or death penalties to worry about, and any Bugsnax will respawn fairly quickly whether you've left the area or not. No Bugsnax, not even the game's group of mini-bosses, stays gone for long if you somehow misplaced it. However, I lost count of the amount of times I was trying to use the springboard to reach a higher ledge or set up the tripwire to stun a passing Bugsnax only for them to blow up in my face. It's not that the game's particularly glitchy either, just that there's only so much consistency from an engine built on physics-based puzzles you can hope to rely upon.

That said, overall I think Bugsnax is a much more confident product than Octodad: Dadliest Catch and a great deal more palatable to deal with in the moment to moment gameplay. If a Bugsnax was proving hard to seize it was usually because I didn't pick up on a particular type of bait or some nearby part of the level that would make it far easier to corner. The sheer amount to see and do, the witty dialogue and deeper waters of these troubled furry blob monsters, the adorable Bugsnax and the way they can only say their own names like any collectible creatures worth their salt, and that almost every capture is a puzzle to be solved made for an exceptional second project from a studio evidently worth keeping an eye on. There are times where it wore my patience thin but I was glad to discover that there was much more to Bugsnax than just a catchy trailer song.

Rating: 4 out of 5.