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 with its goofy animal characters and sustained environmentalist message, it’s also uniquely driven in its sense of oddball purpose. 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. Eventually, these decisions culminate in a watery, unmemorable conclusion. 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. 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. 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. Biomutant is, broadly stated, a bit of a mess.
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