A cool little puzzle platformer released last week: Bionic Bay, where you're a little pixel scientist who, exiled to some strange biomechanical world, uses their teleportation tool to escape its strange pitfalls, tech, and traps.
At first glance it's a pretty straightforward physics-driven platformer with really nice pixel art and lovely modern lighting effects for the explosions and such—but there's always the puzzle platforming twist.
You take that realistic physics system and give yourself a position-swapping teleportation tool to change places with nearby objects. About to get hit by missiles? Swap with a nearby crate or enemy. Need to build a stack of heavy things? Swap them up into a staircase one at a time.
Layered on top of that there's a system for altering gravity that just... turns the whole world around you. Sideways is now up, or up is now down, and rather than falling into a deadly trap you're falling parallel to it.
Bionic Bay is a collaboration between solo developer Mureena, who previously did art and design for games like Badland and Badland 2, and Psychoflow Studio, a programming and technical duo from Taiwan whose first foray into games is Bionic Bay.
It's certainly a very pretty game, with great use of varied color palettes and advanced lighting combined with ultra-dense pixel art to form detailed landscapes that I'm really enjoying just looking at, let alone exploring.
Bionic Bay is clearly designed from the ground up for those who like to speedrun platformers. It has an integrated ghost system and leaderboards for competing against others' times, which "updates with new events regularly."
You can find out more about Bionic Bay on its stylish website, or see Bionic Bay on Steam, where it's $20, 10% off until April 30.
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