Bugsnax’s resident mean girl doesn’t deserve her bad rap
Games Features What Are You Playing This Weekend?
Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off our weekly open thread for the discussion of gaming plans and recent gaming glories, but of course, the real action is down in the comments, where we invite you to answer our eternal question: What Are You Playing This Weekend?
When I first crash into Snacktooth Island in Young Horses, Inc.’s open-world hunting adventure Bugsnax, I am immediately accosted by a number of signs that point toward an extraordinary experience. Maybe it’s the skittering, anthropomorphic french fry-like spiders that occupy a nearby cave or the gigantic flying pizza, à la Mothra, that attempts to murder me upon arrival, but the feeling that more than a few intriguing creatures and unfettered whimsy will underscore my journey—or what is supposed to be an on-location news assignment, as my in-game character is a journalist—grows with every step. Before long, a run-in with a Grumpus (a fairly harmless monster-person) named Filbo, the interim mayor of a recently abandoned community called Snaxburg, confirms as much. Affable and largely helpless, the friendly Grumpus asks me to not only find his missing leader and friend, Lizbert Megafig, but to also rehabilitate his beloved town by bringing all of the departed Grumpuses back to Snaxburg—an ostensibly easy task if all Grumpuses are as kind and amenable as the doe-eyed Filbo.
But the arrival of Beffica Winklesnoot, a violently purple, brusque chatterbox with a penchant for gossip, quickly nullifies any such assumption. “Like, oh my gawd, is this squeeb really talking to me right now,” Beffica immediately sasses in Filbo’s general direction, flippant and merciless as they dive into a quick exchange that ends with her accusing my cerulean tour guide of being a bad leader. There’s really no two ways about it: Beffica is rude and, toward Filbo, a touch mean-spirited. Her delivery is abrasive—enough to make me sincerely hope that my final mission somehow involves me launching the haughty fluff nugget into Frosted Peak.
For a second, I’m quick to cosign Filbo’s various moments of shit-talking that positions Beffica as the clear villain. But as time marches on and more of Snaxburg’s vibrant community returns to the fray, it becomes clear that while far from being the best of the island’s residents, Beffica is hardly the worst. In fact, she’s one of the most self-assured, forthright characters of the game whose biggest crime is being nosey for the greater good. And as a person who is tasked with rebuilding this small society with minimal help from the supposed mayor, she’s not totally wrong about Filbo’s lackluster leadership.
For each Grumpus, a significant factor in proving one’s worth and ultimately convincing the population to return to Snaxburg lies in their ability to catch (or in some harrowing cases, defeat) bugsnax. Catching these elusive food-animal hybrids are a true test of wit and stamina, but often come at the expense of the hunter’s safety. That’s not a complaint. Technically, I signed up for all of this (even if a truly decent leader would get in the trenches with me and at least pretend to be somewhat helpful, Filbo). Besides, without some element of danger or conflict, there wouldn’t be much of a game to enjoy and, in my case, ceaselessly ponder.
However, out of all of Snaxburg’s inhabitants, Beffica is the least likely to send me off on a life-or-death mission for her own personal gain. The majority of her tasks involve little more than spying on the other residents and exchanging gossip-adjacent information that may be helpful to me in the long run. (Some journalists would call that a “scoop.”) She’s one of the few whose focus remains finding Lizbert and her missing partner, Eggabell, and she’s the most helpful when it comes to providing resources, like my handy and necessary fact-tracking journal, and information that is actually pertinent to the looming recovery mission. If her greatest flaw is that she’s a little too honest at times and calls me “bestie” too liberally, then that’s more than manageable.
Some examples of personalities that aren’t as sustainable within an intimate community setting can be found in fellow Grumpuses Cromdo, a swindling, Danny DeVito-inspired salesman who is willing to lie, cheat, and steal from his neighbors for a prayer’s chance at a decent payout; or Wambus, an adorably folksy but selfish farmer who shamelessly kidnapped and ate another Grumpus’ domesticated bugsnax in cold blood. In comparison, Beffica is harmless and maintains no airs about who she is: a neighborhood drama queen who just wants to hold her own against Snaxburg’s more pitiless occupants. Before falling into the easily-laid trap of hating her, keep in mind that she is surrounded by far worse monsters. (And to her credit, she does realize how ridiculous the whole bestie assertion is.)
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It’s been a low-key, socially distanced week of vacation. I’ve played the ever-loving shit out of My Time at Portia and only just last night met the last character at… 68 hours played. There are still at least two sections of the map I haven’t unlocked, so I know there’s plenty more crafting and exploring and dungeon crawling and archaeology ahead of me. I feel like I must be done with at least half of the main storyline? But this game just keeps getting bigger as it goes. If the game just handed me a new, larger map and said, “Surprise! Portia is the entire planet, and the world you’ve been exploring is just one continent,” it’d be very on-brand. I don’t even really know what I’m in for when I start achievement hunting. Steam says I’m at 32 out of 91, and I’m not sure if it’s just loaded to the gills with small silly things to try, or if there really is a ton more main game left.It really is a great game that takes me back to the first time I played the original Harvest Moon. I keep thinking I’ll play one more day, one more day, one more day, and then suddenly it’s 5 a.m., and what am I even doing with my life right now? But I almost have that new crafting station built, so, all right, we’re gonna finish assembling that, and THEN we’re going to bed, except, oh, shoot, is tomorrow a festival?I also hit up my Switch backlog and played Blaster Master Zero 2 from start to finish. There were some fun ideas, and I liked that there were some more bite-sized stages to make exploration/collecting parts more manageable, and I definitely liked that there was a galaxy map overworld so I didn’t have to traverse the entire if I wanted to check out an earlier area, but… I don’t know. I think it has a tough time existing in the same universe as a fantastic remake of a game I got for my birthday over 30 years ago. The new characters are all very anime, I didn’t enjoy the final stretch of the game at all, and I never had to learn the final boss’s patterns and get good because he was weak to hardcore mashing. The game was worth the very reasonable price I paid for it, but the last 90 minutes or so really soured the whole experience.And I finally bopped through the the King Knight campaign in Shovel Knight. I don’t know if this is going to be one I appreciate more on the second time around when I’m gunning for the New Game + and speed run achievements, or if Yacht Club was just overdue for a dud. I know I didn’t feel all that excited about Plague Knight’s campaign until I started experimenting with shot types and secondary items and found 2-3 different setups to switch through depending on the situation, but… I dunno. My issue with Plague Knight was that I didn’t get him at first. With King Knight, it’s not like there are mechanics and power-ups I haven’t experimented with yet. I don’t like the character, I don’t like the card game, and the controls are fiddly. They make sense when you’ve got a good line through a level, you’re air dashing into the walls you need to hit to gain the clearance you need to make it on to platforms, but the moment something knocks you off a ledge, it becomes a very Smash Bros experience of desperately trying 6 different moves to get back on while everything in the game conspires to edge guard you. The levels are all pretty bite-sized, which I like, but I got real tired of falling into pits by the end.And on the Steam Fall Sale, I just picked up Axiom Verge, Iconoclasts, Control, Guacamelee 2, and Outer Wilds. I guess I needed more metroidvanias. I’ll probably just be hitting up more Portia for the rest of the weekend, but the next time I’m ready to start a new game and I look over my library, I’m now definitely not going to say, “Huh, why is every game I own an RPG?”
i am still on my game boycott, six months in, it was being an unproductive time suck. i was playing city of heroes homecoming, but after a year i was getting bored. then i downloaded Civ 6 for free from epic games and played that for a while.
since i am trying to get into my second year of a masters program for specialisation, clinical psychology in art therapy, in a french university, this is what i have been spending most of my time on. i need to write a proposal for my second masters thesis, but my two previous proposals have been rejected. so this time i have been using that writers creative tool and i have been writing background theory details, i am at 12 pages so far, to write a 2-3 page proposal. it is basically a combination of winnicott’s transitional space and transtional objects with jung’s theory of consciousness and the self, specifically for use with art therapy and psychosis. it is slow going, but if i can lay the groundwork for a decent proposal then it will be groundwork for the thesis too. :)in france, we are finally coming out of our second wave of COVID and our second lockdown. we have only been allowed to go outside for exercise 1 hour and 1km distance from home. i gained a bunch of weight during the first lockdown, so this time i have started walking around the countryside. since i am in a rural area, i have been exploring all the nieghboring vineyards, roads, dirt roads, forests, trails, bike trails, wildboar runs, etc, that i can find. i have mapped all of this, and i made a “heat” map, the thicker the lines and whiter, the more i have used them. this is from the past 10 weeks (picture below), walking 4-5 times a week, 2-5kms each time. (note: some were made before the lockdown.) no thanksgiving is possible this year, lockdown and no gatherings, etc. maybe next year…. stay safe, everyone! 🙂
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Weren’t Jung’s theories just conjecture predicated on his supernatural beliefs? How’s that supposed to fit into evidence-based medicine?
good question! he was a medical psychiatrist and clinician first. a contemporary and friend of freud, but the difference was that he worked with the insane and not only the “neurotic.” but he had a mental breakdown, i think mid way through his career. you can read his “red book” which were his writings about his struggle with mental illness. it profoundly affected his thinking and work afterwards. it became more esoteric, for lack of a better word, more philosophical. but when you approach a subject like consciousness, what can you measure? conscious and unconscious content, the mind and the self, what are its limits? why do we dream what we dream? if you do not consciously create your emotions, but yet experience them, where do they come from? who made them? why? why are there universal human symbols? jung was not talking about the brain anymore, but the mind. how can you quantify that?
i am not studying a medicine based, DSM 5, form of psychology, in fact the medical model is de-emphasised. in fact, we do not talk about illness, that is a medical term and it implies that there is a cure. but where is your sense of agency of you getting better if it is only a matter of an imbalance of chemicals in your brain? do you have any control in your getting better or at least managing? this is not to say that it is anti-psychopharmacology, just that the emphasis is on the mind and its agency rather than a reliance on medicine and no therapy. in my case, hopefully, it will be an art based therapy. that is to say using art as a means of alleviating patient’s suffering over the long term.
I don’t mean medicine just in terms of pharmacology, what I mean is that the workings of the mind are closely interlinked with other disciplines like neuroscience, anthropology, etc., which provide more plausible answers to the questions that Jung was trying to answer with pseudoscience.Besides, how does “therapy that alleviates a patients’ suffering” not come under medicine?
i think one problem in answering this is how do you regard science? can it eventually answer all questions? i mean can philosophical questions be answered by science? are you talking the brain? the brain is science, it is the body, it can be measured, its actions and reactions can be quantified. the mind? can you measure consciousness? what is consciousness? can someone have more consciousness than another? 10% more? can you measure suffering? can you measure what you feel? what are dreams? who are you? are “you” only your conscious self? if not, what is the not-conscious part of you? what does that means to you as a whole? i am talking a subjective model of psychology, not an objective one. i mean you can use science to pinpoint the place in the brain where one can have a religious experience, but can you use science to explain what that experience means to the person that experienced it? does that experience cease to have meaning if we know where it happens in the brain?
there are cognitive therapy methods that can be used, for example, and we use those. but i think the question is what do you want to emphasize? how we can help you? scientifically, as a patient, we can look at you as a measurable combination of things, a grouping of probabilities of certain things and other things. you have X% chance of being this or that, 4 out of 10 criteria that makes you fall under that category and not that. if we do this, add this chemical, this will happen Y% of the time. another way of approching people suffering problems is looking at them as an individual, not as a statistic, but a human being and aiding them with their individual experiences.
we are just so used to the medical model of psychology, using the terms of illness and patients, that we can forget that this is not the only way of approaching the subject. it is just the dominant model, not because of its sucess in curing people, but in its sucess of controlling the narrative. the book “madness in civilization” by andrew scull is a very good book about societies trying to deal with the problem of madness and mental illnesses. as much as we want to say we are making progress, in some ways we are not.
You’re just creating a false dichotomy between therapy and pharmacology – the latter of which, due to diverse brain chemistry, DOES have to be tailored to individuals in order to work, and DOES require practitioners to be involved with peoples individual experiences in order to gauge its efficacy – and ignoring the fact that they tend to be used in tandem anyway.
Science isn’t a system of belief or a body of knowledge, it’s a process of discovery. It’s the concept of treating nothing as known until we know it. To eschew the idea of evidence-based treatment is to do a disservice to patients/clients, who need to trust that the practitioner has some semblance of expertise and isn’t simply peddling snake oil or testing unproven treatments. Involving pseudoscience only adds to the stigma that people dealing with mental illness or atypicality already face.
whoa easy here killer! i was not looking for fight, but i am now getting the sense that you may have been, especially with your opening question. in direct response to that… jung had the psychological equivalent of a religious experience and it changed him. some of his answers were unorthodox, but he was a very, very smart man and extremely well educated. read him and you will always see his doubt to his own answers, because he knew he was dealing with extremely subjective matter and trying to be as scientific and logical in thinking as possible. unfortunately some of his ideas have gained a lot of misunderstanding over time. like the collective unconscious, for example. i used to think that meant that it was some great psychic connection, connecting all humans by “magic?” no, he was asking what was under the conscious mind, then under the unconsicious mind, and then under the instincts and emotions, and under the biology, and then under the genetic configuration that forms the brain, the humanity that connects us all, and under all of that was the world, what ever that meant. you do get the feeling that he may have had a more gnostic philosophical answer too, but he was a scientist as well as a christian, but he did not express it because religion is a personal matter, and science is a public matter. he did use christ as a metaphor for his understanding of what the whole Self was. but if mixing religious metaphors to try and understand something so difficult a subject is pseudo-scientific, well i do not know what to say to you… it was the best way that he had, and it does not undermine the validity of what he had to say.
i am not attacking your belief systems here and saying that they are false. nor am i ignoring the science, nor saying it is false. nor am i trying to impose a viewpoint. criticizing science does not make me anti-science, it is just that i realize the limits of it. science is not the answer to everything. science is a logic-based, hubristic belief system, but one that constantly believes that it currently holds the truth or is always on the cusp of it, until the next better explanation comes around… (i am just saying that to annoy you.) 😉
medical psychology does help a lot of people with mental health issues, but it has yet to cure one single one of them. isn’t that the whole point of medicine? sometimes science creates more problems than it helps. that snakeoil that you are accusing me of selling, a lot of current medical psychology only has a veneer of truth. but ask them what is schizophrenia and its origins, and you will not get a definitive answer and maybe you never will either. muchless a cure. they can only supress the symptoms. thorazine and lobotomies were the miracle cures not that long ago. psychopharacology is an infant science, but there are some questions that could be asked. what is autism? if we knew that, should we cure it? it is considered a mental health issue…
for me, my therapy would be to help them get on with their life, not fix them.
i am not looking for a fight. i promise that will read any response that you write, but i am done responding to you. i will let you have the last word if you so wish.
There’s no point, you’re projecting your own idea of what my stance is instead of engaging with what I’m actually writing.Also if you weren’t trying to annoy people then why did you barge into a gaming thread to flex about your academic career? (Rhetorical question since we’re disengaging.)
I probably only caught the outlines of this dialogue—I’m at work and I’m not really in the frame of mind to really dive into it—but comment threads like this do remind me of why I stick around the AVC long after much of the old guard has taken off for greener pastures. In any case, I hope your studies go well!
thanks! it is funny because i am posting this and people are wondering why i am posting on the bugsnax thread. but it is the what am i gaming this weekend, and my answer is nothing, but this is what i am doing instead. not sure why i went of on a tangent, and why i responded to someone who obviously trolling me. i do remember the old AVC boards, before kinja, with their several hundred, sometimes meandering, raging flame threads to some random article. 🙂
LOL, you think neurology informs psychology today? Neurology can’t even inform itself; it’s pseudo-science.
Interesting that video game players online have completely lost all idea what “boycott” means.
Am I the only one who thinks Bugsnax looks incredibly ugly? Like, it’s actively off-putting to look at.This weekend will be for setting up my new TV; and playing the same stuff on it as I don’t own a 4K device. I’ll have to see which of my games have HDR support; but I’ll probably continue chipping away at Crash 4 regardless.
Having played the game fully, I feel like that’s a bit crazy personally. The game’s artwork is terrific IMO.
Maybe, I just find that style really offputting. It grates.
After years of waiting, Hiveswap Act 2 is finally out, so I’m probably going to play it twice this weekend – once to just go through and see the story, and then maybe once again to try out random combinations of items and actions and characters to see what jokes are stuffed in there. I love the writing in it, but I’m a little disappointed in how unpolished little aspects are, like several items that don’t receive any visual representation. I’m still glad it’s here at all though and I’m loving all the new troll characters I’m meeting. I’m spending Thanksgiving at my parents house, which has meant a lot of time watching TV and realizing my parents are just idly playing Wordscapes in the background. I’ve downloaded it myself and while it’s got all the freemium mobile app stuff I have to say this game has some of the fastest and strongest Tetris effect I’ve experienced. Within minutes I was rearranging circles of letters in my head, looking for anagrams. I’m not sure if I’ll become addicted like they are, but it’s humbling realizing that this little game has a wider playerbase than all my other favorites I’ve played this year put together. Finally, once I get home I’m booting up my N64 and trying to beat the homestretch of Conker’s Bad Fur Day. While the graphics, humor and gameplay are definitely very much of the 90’s, overall it’s aged pretty nicely and it’s been a treat to experience end to end. I wish Conker’s moveset was a bit more expansive like Banjo-Kazooie’s, but the lack 5 interlocking systems of progress gating collectibles has just made it all feel so much more chill and fun to play. I wish there were more narrative/exploration driven 3-D platformers like it, since I’m not sure what I’ll want to play next in the genre.
Bugsnax was a fun game, the actual puzzles and gameplay is very simplistic but the story and characters are really well done. On the topic of the article, the one thing I remember most about Beffica is she always beelined towards the bathroom every morning, was unusual as I never saw any other character do that other than Filbo in a Wambus quest where him using the restroom is part of the objective.My favorite character was Chandlo.
Continuing my adventures in Yakuza: Like a Dragon this weekend. It’s an extremely long game. I’ve already sunk 70+ hours into it, and I predict that there’s at least another 20 hours left to go. But as far as JRPGs go, it’s excellent. It’s not as self-serious as some of RGG Studio’s past titles, but it also tells a tale that comments on contemporary sociopolitical issues, such as gentrification and homelessness. Overall, I’m enjoying it so far, though the battle system can be a bit tedious and grindy after 70 hours of play.
Hey all! SO much Shadow of War this weekend. It was free with PS+ and I cant stop jumping off buildings and murdering Orc captainsALSOMy partner and some of our friends are doing a 24h Charity stream on Twitch for our local child and youth services. Please check it out and donate if you’re able!!
twitch.tv/playingforcharitylive
I finally took advantage of my Amazon Luna early access subscription yesterday to begin “Control,” which my current hardware cannot run natively.
I’m about one third of the way through judging by the skill tree, and it is . . . a Remedy game. Which is a good thing! The first two Maxes Payne sit together as one of my top ten favorite games of all time, and for the most part “Control” compares very favorably to them.I especially like how “Control” takes the “New York Minute” mode from the Payne series and plops it in there as countdown side missions. In fact, the most fun I’ve had so far with the game’s combat was when I accepted one such side mission — fast travel back to Dead Letter, with 15 minutes to shoot my way into the Communications Department and just rip through perma-spawning goons in order destroy a bunch of Hiss portals.The “evade” ability isn’t as much fun as bullet time, especially when using it to dive from a higher position, but it works well enough.
The destructive environments are just gorgeous. I don’t think I’ve played such a viscerally John Woovian third person game in terms of stray bullets blowing shit up in the background since “Enter the Matrix.”Which, oddly enough, is the game that for me best explains the faults in “Control’s” combat — in “Enter the Matrix,” you put up with a whole lot of jank and frustration to occasionally experience the dizzying highs of running your pistols dry while charging at a SWAT dude, flipping off walls to avoid return fire, and then disarming that SWAT guy and using his gun as a baseball bat to knock him out before turning it on the rest of his squad. “Control” is much prettier, but ultimately . . . I don’t want to say “suffers,” because a cinematic game like this almost requires near-breaking point frustration before one of those perfect transcendent shootouts — but at times it feels like you’re grinding through stuff, albeit grinding by chucking rocks at people using the power of your mind — that’s telekinesis, Kyle!
Anyway, “Control” is great and I’m enjoying the hell out of it, plus the collectible item backstory deal has completely drawn me in, so that’s number one on the agenda.
I might also continue playing the “Chex Quest” remaster, which I think is doing something needlessly smart with its very stupid material, because there’s one level where you have to drain successive levels of a milk tank by pulling levers and zorching Flemoids, but when Fred Chexter — yes, apparently Chex Guy has a legal name, or at least a copyrighted one, and it is “Fred Chexter” — gets to the bottom of the milk tank, having drained all the milk, he quips, “A bit soggy for my taste!”
Like, what does that say about the mutually assured deliciousness between Chex and milk? Also, they retconned Chex Squadron into Chex Mix Squadron, because you get the multiplayer unlock codes for the remaster off the back of Chex Mix bags instead of the entire game inside a box of Chex cereal? Methinks something rotten on the planet Bazoik. . . .