I got my hands on Biomutant one day before it released, so I’m only around 4 hours into it right now. Based on that relatively narrow slice of gameplay, I was very much looking forward to seeing where its Steam score ended up landing today. My money was on “mixed”—Biomutant is a huge swing that combines a fascinatingly bizarre approach to things with a whole lot of ill-conceived mechanics, design omissions, and workarounds, so I figured it’d follow the Eternity: The Last Unicorn model of releasing at a mixed rating before sliding down into negative territory. However, I forgot to take the 60 dollar price tag into account, and it started out at “mostly negative” before clawing its way back up to a mixed rating.

Price and expectations are inextricably linked, so it’s not surprising that so many people are having a gut reaction to Biomutant that’s basically “why to all of this?” I want to ignore the price tag for a moment, though, and consider whether it’s a good or bad game. The answer isn’t as straightforward as it is with most games because I find myself looking forward to playing Biomutant despite hating many of its parts.

Let’s start with the only unequivocally bad thing about Biomutant: its writing. Populating a post-humanity world with creatures deformed by humanity’s chemicals makes for a colorful setting, but every line of dialog and corner of the world is explained to you by the world’s neediest narrator. It’s like watching a movie in another language by hiring a translator to stand in front of your TV and comment on things.

This approach is confusing since Biomutant is a mess of screwy names, cutesy terminology, and abstract dialog to begin with. Throw in the narrator’s tendency to use pronouns to refer to different characters without establishing which one he’s referring to and you have a perfect storm of confusion. I can barely keep up with the dialog, and since you have to sit through each NPC’s chittering before the translation starts, I’ve accidentally skipped through a bunch of translations by hitting the skip button right as the translation starts playing. Biomutant doesn’t feel like a vehicle for story delivery. It’s needlessly incoherent.

And the lack of clarity is exacerbated by the weightlessness of Biomutant‘s animations, which results in many scenes playing a little faster than they should. A cutscene of a villain attacking out of nowhere can end before you can tell if it’s you or someone else being targeted; Biomutant is weird enough that it’s hard to differentiate between irradiated NPCs at a glance, so using the cutscene equivalent of jump cuts makes it extra difficult to follow what’s happening at any given moment. Combine all of these problems together and you have a story that isn’t really followed so much as dangled in front of you with one hand while it slaps you with the other, leaving you clinging to the rare moments that can be vaguely understood.

If you pull any individual mechanic out and examine it, it’s pretty easy to find something wrong. Crafting is overwhelming at first, combat lacks weight, taking damage has almost no feedback, hit detection is questionable, and the writing/quest design is so out there that I find myself completing sidequests that I don’t even remember accepting. At the end of the day, though, Biomutant isn’t defined by its individual mechanics. Combining all of this weirdness results in a game far stranger than the sum of its parts.

And for whatever reason, I don’t hate Biomutant (yet, hopefully) in any meaningful way. It feels like a game pulled from a parallel universe where the industry evolved differently. It takes an oversaturated, homogeneous genre—the “open-world action game with crafting”—and pushes it in such unusual directions that I can honestly say that I haven’t played anything like Biomutant in my entire life.

Uniqueness has a lot of value. Especially if you’re like me and have jumped between enough games to recognize how few truly unique ideas there are out there. Despite a constant desire to throw the narrator into a volcano and numerous peculiarities that make it impossible to tell whether the game’s bugging out or merely executing one of its unusual mechanics properly, I look forward to playing more of it.

In many ways, Biomutant is far too good to be considered bad and far too bad to be called good.

Biomutant is sitting at a “mixed” rating on Steam. Let’s talk about it. first appeared on Killa Penguin