Sep 4, 2021 7:00 AM

Biomutant and Ratchet & Clank Epitomize the Gaming Budget Gap

Two games. Two foxlike creature-heroes. Vastly different outcomes.

This summer saw the release of two games that feature talking foxlike creatures as their protagonists. Biomutant, the debut game from Swedish studio Experiment 101 has found an audience, though not one that's likely to praise the game without qualifications. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, the latest in a nearly two-decade-long video game series from American studio Insomniac Games, has done much better, commercially and critically—as is to be expected of a technologically impressive, major-publisher-backed release. Both games having furry mutant heroes as protagonists is a coincidence, albeit one that puts the two titles into conversation with one another and, in the process, demonstrates the differences in games made with markedly different budgets and audience expectations.

Biomutant

Courtesy of Experiment 101

In Biomutant, the player is cast as a weirdly formed creature, its limbs mismatched and its evolution into a coherent form seemingly unfinished. It may, depending on customization options, have big furry cat ears, tiny eyes, and an underbite; one arm may glow an angry red to denote resistance to fire while the other is wrapped in bandages and clutches a rusty revolver. In Rift Apart, players control a pair of bipedal fox-people called Lombaxes. One of them, the titular Ratchet, is a wide-eyed, floppy-eared guy with yellow fur. The other, Rivet, is a wide-eyed, floppy-eared girl with blue fur. Both of them are perfectly formed, their design iterated upon and displayed in pixel-perfect resolution, to ensure that they form a striking silhouette both in-game and on promotional imagery. Their cartoon features are arranged in just such a way as to look cute and expressive without becoming unintentionally off-putting in the process. Their guns are shiny.

Though Biomutant and Rift Apart are different types of games—the former is a fairly open-ended role-playing game that emphasizes the player’s freedom of choice, while the latter is a tightly directed series of action-heavy levels with a predetermined storyline—their release within several weeks of one another and their shared aim to appeal to a wide demographic, rather than the usual 18-plus audience of most blockbuster games, illustrates a noteworthy split in the medium’s mainstream.

Biomutant is, broadly stated, a bit of a mess. Its world is frequently wonderful to look at in a sprouting-green-field-on-a-cool-spring-day kind of way, but players interact with that setting by running from one mission marker to another, slapping at enemies with all the weight of two pillowcases knocking against one another in the dryer. Its story fizzles out into an amorphous set of (literally) black-and-white moral choices between a shadowy "evil" and brightly glowing "good" set of characters who pop up next to text boxes illustrating either viciously cruel or saintly choices. A karma gauge moves from one side to the other after picking between sparing or murdering enemies, attacking a newly free captive or sending them on their way. Eventually, these decisions culminate in a watery, unmemorable conclusion. It’s extremely rough around the edges. But it is also distinctly itself. There are a number of stylistic choices that may not work as well as they ought to—its characters speak in cutesy sentence fragments that don’t quite come off properly, as if confused as to whether they’re speaking the terse, punctuation-shy dialog of a Cormac McCarthy novel's hard-bitten criminals or filling the pages of a children’s storybook. But with its goofy animal characters and sustained environmentalist message, it’s also uniquely driven in its sense of oddball purpose.

Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart

Courtesy of Insomniac Games

Rift Apart, on the other hand, is so meticulously designed, it feels like it sprang fully formed from the sugary cranium of a good-humored, cartoon-addled 10-year-old. It, too, is colorful and filled with life. But, unlike Biomutant, it demonstrates its creator’s experience in refining the physicality of an interactable cartoon character into something tangible—the cheery jingle of collectible bolts vacuuming up into the character’s body, the tap of a character’s feet on metal pathways felt through the PlayStation 5’s vibrating controller, the flop of Ratchet’s or Rivet’s ears as they spring off a railing or platform to fly through the sky. Every hour spent moving through its uniquely themed planets feels like eating handfuls of penny candy without the ensuing stomach ache. In short, it’s an exceptionally good-looking and well-crafted game.

For all of these qualities, though, Rift Apart’s story has a far more general focus than Biomutant’s unevenly executed but passionately expressed theme. Where Biomutant spends a dozen or so hours telling a fantastical kid’s story about the annihilatory effects of corporate-led climate destruction, Rift Apart devotes the same amount of time to a more intimate narrative about found families—discovering connections in places beyond those you’ve always known, and embracing change with a spirit of adventure rather than fear. This is a valuable message, too, though one that might seem like it lacks teeth in comparison to the more specific concerns of an environmental apocalypse.

The temptation is to root for Experiment 101’s scrappy debut as an underappreciated gem, standing in opposition to Insomniac’s better-funded addition to a series of games whose entries now number in the double digits. But as Rift Apart’s lead writer, Lauren Mee, says in an email interview with WIRED, there’s also excitement in “having the opportunity to create something that a massive, diverse group of people can potentially enjoy and gain something from.”

Creative director Marcus Smith explains that Rift Apart is, indeed, meant to appeal “to the broadest possible set of players,” but he says that isn’t as constrictive as it may sound when considering age demographics or the potentially competing interests within large studio teams.

“The best entertainment that is created for a younger audience is also appealing to adults, because it deals with understandable conflict and emotional connections that are universally relatable. And it features characters who are charmingly flawed,” he says. “We don’t make any adjustments to accommodate for kids versus adults,” he adds. “We make the game that appeals to us.” In the case of Rift Apart, that meant working from the main theme of “duality,” reflected in the game’s dimension-shifting plot and movement design, and “building the story, gameplay, and art design to cater to that.”

The desire to make something broadly appealing works well for Rift Apart. Its thematic intent is unspecific enough that Insomniac doesn’t appear to have compromised or limited the scope of its narrative in the attempt to create something that connects with an enormous audience. But this isn’t always the case, especially as games attempt to more directly interpret historical and modern fact as fodder for a dreamed-of, universal art that appeals to all and offends none. Every year, new commercial military shooters are released that try to temper their desire to draw on real-world history and politics with a mushy promise not to offer a viewpoint on these immediate, vitally important topics. The result, at worst, is work that reinforces reactionary ideologies, and, at best, is a kind of tasteless gruel that leaves no real impression behind.

As mainstream-game-development costs balloon to meet the increasingly high standards of players who expect every modern release to look beautiful and play smoothly, the need to create for as wide an audience as possible will only continue. In this kind of climate, smaller studios may be the only ones willing to take a risk on making their outlook on the world plainly known, and of more successfully communicating potentially alienating themes. Looking to a big-budget military shooter for a clearly articulated opinion on, say, American foreign policy is largely a waste of time; hoping that an all-ages action game will take a bold stance on the best method to address wealth inequality is a fool's errand. These kinds of games are, by design, uninterested in suggesting opinions about the world we live in that deviate from an imagined status quo.

Biomutant

Courtesy of Experiment 101

Though it’s a far less enjoyable and coherent game than Rift Apart, Biomutant’s willingness to present a clear, if abstracted argument that corporations are currently leading us on a path to ecological collapse is valuable—not just for its own sake, but for the sake of all the rough-around-the-edges video games that wish to suggest any discernible, potentially audience-limiting point of view. (If “It’s worth protecting the planet” seems like a milquetoast example of these sorts of messages, the most recent possible example of this has just played out in a different genre. We learned at the time of writing that the upcoming Battlefield 2042’s vision of an Earth devastated by environmental collapse was created purely “for gameplay reasons across the board,” not as any sort of statement that would put off, we suppose, climate change deniers.) The kind of direct convictions expressed in games made while even less beholden to external financial entities than Biomutant—which was, after all, released through publisher THQ Nordic—are even more valuable in this light.

“Ultimately the lesson we hoped the player would get out of the game was a simple, but poignant one that is easily forgotten—we need each other,” Ratchet's lead writer, Lauren Mee, says. “Rift Apart tells a story about what it means to work together to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds. It’s about our differences making us stronger.”

Nobody could object to this message, and that makes it an excellent one to be used as the basis for a video game meant to appeal to all types of players, regardless of their viewpoints. But not every big-budget game is Ratchet & Clank, and its narrative strengths aren’t always going to be applicable when it comes to mainstream games that deal with more pointed subject matter. This is why it’s important to give the sort of game that Biomutant represents a shot, even if their bipedal fox-creatures are less striking, assured, and well, nice to look at than the perfect Lombaxes of Rift Apart.