Bugsnax is the second game from Young Horses, followup to Octodad. It is delightfully weird. Literal Actual Muppets called Grumpuses have charted an expedition to Snaktooth Island, and their expedition has fallen apart. You, a journalist grumpus, have traveled there to discover what happened. What happened is they found bugsnax, which are kinda bug and kinda snak.

You round up all the grumpuses, help them with their problems, get new abilities and ways to capture bugsnax. You also run around feeding bugsnax to various grumpuses, which turns them into the consumed snak.

It’s sorta Pokemon-ish, but . . not really? It’s about collecting adorable monster things that wander around saying their name, but it’s not about just brute force catching them, it’s sorta more like Pokemon Snap, but you also a puzzle game. You’re out there surveying 8 different biomes, finding all the snaks, learning their patterns, figuring out what they like, and then puzzling out how to capture all of them. With difficulties ranging from “wait for them to walk in their path” to “ok well first you need to set Scoopy Banoopy on fire by tripping him with a fire tripwire, then you have to wait for him to explode into his constituent snaks, then you need to go find where the Scoopy ran off to, lure him out with chocolate sauce, get him on a hard surface, and trap him”.

Each biome has a unique set of snax, introduces a new tool or tool combo, new ways to get snax to interact, a new character to help, etc. There’s a lot of stuff to do in the game, and it’s all pretty perfectly right-sized. Yeah it’s a collectathon, but it’s not like, collect the same damn thing 400 times per zone. Everything is just different enough. Quests aren’t 800 steps. It’s like . . enough to feel like you’re accomplishing stuff, but there isn’t so much garbage heaped upon you that it’s oppressive, and that getting everything is doable and still feels good. Like, I did everything there is to do in the game, and never really felt like I was grinding or whatever.

The DLC . . which is weird because it was bundled with the Xbox release . . was pretty good! It had some sorta screwy combos, but it still all worked. The DLC island was like a biome and a half worth of content, and it’s great, it was a free update! Even the DLC island was right-sized. Just super well balanced the whole way through.

The only bit of the game that dragged on was due to my own brainworms. One of the additions from the DLC was the ability to do bite-sized quests for all the grumpuses to get presents that furnish your hut. That’s cool, but there’s an achievement for getting one of every slot on your house . . and the quests are random. So I had to them over and over and over til I finally got the last two slots. Some of those dragged on, because a lot of them are super obnoxious. But that’s my brain problems.

Everything else was amazing. A+. Absolute triumph of indie game design. Strongly Recommended.