Seeing characters shrink down to microscopic proportions and get zapped deep inside the innards of a living organism is always a welcome trope in animation, but in games it’s much less explored territory. BioGun, an upcoming Metroidvania from Dapper Dog Digital and Ravenage Games, takes it and turns it: you’re a sharpshooting, agile… vaccine. And you’re deep inside a dog’s body, fighting off the deadly Dooper virus.
Mechanically it summons Metroid Fusion, Mega Man and the likes of Hollow Knight, but there’s also something about its animation style that speaks to the bombastic, slightly unhinged cartoons of the mid-nineties: Earthworm Jim (and its associated platformer) feel like just as much of a touchstone here as Yoshio Sakamoto’s work. It’s rare for a platformer’s premise to inflame the imagination quite this much, and that premise is married to an art style that isn’t pretending it’s still 1995, but pays its dues to the golden age of platforming too. Hand-drawn animations breathe life into high-res 2D art, throwing up scene after scene of outlandish, surreal landscapes. This is, unequivocally, the most artistic consideration that has ever gone into depicting a canine gall bladder in PC gaming history.
As Bek the vaccine—developed using pig DNA, since you ask—makes their way through organs and cellular superhighways, their arsenal of attacks and moves grows, as you’d expect from a Metroidvania. Quite how and why microcellular shopkeepers set up their stalls here is unexplained, but it’s just as well they did because the bacteria, viruses and infections you’re up against aren’t messing about. You’re gonna need to tool up.
Traditionally the downside of the genre is labyrinthine navigation and tedious back-tracking, but developer Dapper Dog Digital is clear: they want this to be a Metroidvania people actually finish. To that end, level design is about density of experience and enjoyment. Instead of sprawling maps in which most of your time is spent simply running towards the next cool thing, here it’s less segmented. Vaccines don’t get downtime.
That level design philosophy allows you to keep more of the map in your memory, and that in turn means you’re probably more likely to experiment. If you know the various challenges within the fleshy halls of your host, you can start imagining creative solutions - tooling up with different abilities and trying them out in areas that previously slayed you.
And if traversing the inner workings of man’s best friend sounds a little grisly for your liking, just take in a few screenshots—or better yet, dive into the demo, available on the BioGun Steam page—and you’ll immediately recognise a wholesome, abstract approach to the concept. It’s got more in common with Ori and the Blind Forest than Scorn.
