In an early version of Bugsnax you had to dismember the creatures

An early version of Bugsnax would have involved serving them on plates

(Image credit: Young Horses)

Hey, you know Bugsnax? That game with the catchy theme tune and welcoming island full of friendly folk who just want to eat bugs that make them mutate? It walks the line between adorable and unsettling, sometimes crossing over more to one side than the other, but as developers Young Horses recently revealed on Twitter, an early version would have swung hard into unsettling.

That's because, as the clip shows, you had to pull the bugsnax to bits before plating them and serving them to the inhabitants of Snaktooth Island. First we see a fly-like green lollive having its wings ripped off before its pimento tongue gets torn out, and then a pinkle—like a crab but with pickles for legs and a jar for a shell—having its limbs torn off and its body discarded.

An early idea for Bugsnax was that in addition to catching them, you'd have to peel and dismantle their bodies before serving them to your friends! #Bugsnax #ThrowbackThursday pic.twitter.com/CZG1ddGJlGFebruary 25, 2021

Another clip shows a stage of development where Bugsnax would have been an on-rails shooter where you hurl traps at your prey from the back of a food truck. Which is also pretty different to what we eventually got, but I'm having trouble focusing on that because I can't get the haunting eyes of creatures being dismembered out of my head.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.