Biomutantis back in the public eye after an extended period of silence. It turns out that the game wasn’t in any jeopardy as many feared;Biomutant’s developer says it was keeping its heads down on purpose to focus on making the game as strong as possible. Plenty of specific details onBiomutantare still forthcoming, but there’s a couple broader details that are already common knowledge. For instance,Biomutant’s core plot is already known: the game’s unnamed, customizable protagonist has to save the Tree of Life from toxic pollutants before all life starts to suffer.
The way that players follow this plotline is supposedly by going to the ends of the Tree of Life’s five major roots. There, players have to battle monsters and clear up the oil that’s poisoning the Tree. This plot layout rings a bell—it sounds a lot likePaper Mario: The Origami King.That kind of overlap is probably coincidental, though, and it’s totally harmless. The structure thatThe Origami KingandBiomutantuse is a classic kind of video game storytelling, and it just so happens that these games did it in a very similar way.
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The Video Game Checklist
Biomutantasks players to travel to the ends of the Tree of Life’s roots with two objectives in mind: they need to clean up the oil that’s poisoning the tree, and they need to fight monsters that are chewing on the roots in about the same place.Paper Mario: The Origami King,meanwhile,sees Peach’s Castle get spirited awayby King Olly in the game’s first act. When that happens, Mario and Olivia have to travel to the ends of the five streamer strands that bind Peach’s Castle. There, Mario will fight a boss before undoing the strand. It’s all about getting to the end of a checklist of objectives before reaching the game’s conclusion.
This kind of structure just works for video games. It incentivizes the player to explore the world on their own initiative, and it’s a good justification for developers to make diverse areas on the world map for players to visit. Thirty years ago, Nintendo developedThe Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Pastwith a pretty similar structure to this. Players needed to go save the Seven Sages from different dungeons before they could go to the final confrontation of the game and save Hyrule. Ultimately, objective “checklists” are a time-honored tradition in video games.
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Old But Gold
The key to making the structure of the objective checklist work is making it feel fresh and original. InPaper Mario: The Origami King,it worked, since it was an excuse to meet various characters across the Mushroom Kingdom and each area that Mario had to visit was very different. It’s unclear for now that kind of unique landscapes might show up inBiomutant.It’s a post-apocalyptic version of Earth, it seems, so maybe there’ll be echoes of the real world.Horizon Zero DawnandFallouthave long proven that developers can still make unique, memorable locations out of a ruined Earth. With that in mind,Biomutanthas plenty of roomto do the same with its much more fantastical sci-fi lore.
At least it won’t be much longer now before players can find out.Biomutantfinally got a release daterecently, which means the game is in the home stretch and fans will get their hands on it soon enough. The structure thatBiomutantis using may be simple, but it’s the way that Experiment 101 uses it that matters. Even a small rising studio like Experiment 101 can find creative, compelling ways to use a traditional video game formula, so hopefully,Biomutantlives up to its expectations.
Biomutantreleases May 25th, 2021 for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
