Bionic Bay Out Now on PC & PlayStation 5

Speed running scientists and challenge hunters, rejoice. After years of crafting, your invitation to Bionic Bay is now available on Steam and PlayStation 5. It began with a chance meeting on Reddit, and now the Bionic Bay story continues with you, our trusted Research Participants. In Bionic Bay you’ll master the art of teleportation, control the very fabric of time itself, manipulate gravity and navigate a path filled with dangers. Our team will provide you with the tools you’ll need to traverse this intricately crafted pixel art world. But don’t let the stunning visuals fool you, this is no slow-moving narrative crawl. The best way to navigate Bionic Bay is with fast movements, precise controls, exceptional timing, puzzle solving intuition and just maybe a little bit of luck.

What you’ve seen in the Bionic Bay demo is just the beginning. Bionic Bay v1.0 includes 23 painstakingly created levels, with an increasing challenge to simply stay alive through your journey. Importantly, however, the path can be as helpful as it is dangerous, and Research Participants will need to judge the way ahead accordingly. In addition to the main game, we’ve also developed the Bionic Bay Online mode, with a dedicated build for speed runners and those hungry for a challenge. In this demanding arena, you’ll have the opportunity to customize your own scientist, and claim your place on our transient and global leaderboards.

Research Participants the world over, your invitation to our new testing program is available now as Bionic Bay releases for Steam and PlayStation 5. Master the art of teleportation. Control the very fabric of time and space. Manipulate gravity and uncover the mystery of Bionic Bay.

Bionic Bay’s data-ghost racing reflects age-old racing titles, and provides a consistently refreshing challenge for those looking for a little more. While each course lasts for a limited time, placing on here will deliver points against your profile on our global leaderboard. Perform well, and claim speedrunning glory, mastering all of the tools that Bionic Bay offers!

Bionic Bay is available NOW. It’s time to take science into your own hands. Good luck, Research Participants!

The making of hand-crafted pixel-art platformer Bionic Bay
Hello fellow precision platform junkies! I’m Juhana, the Creative Director of Bionic Bay—my most ambitious project yet. Bionic Bay is a precision-puzzle platformer set in an ancient bio-mechanical world, hand-crafted pixel by pixel to create a high-fidelity, atmospheric environment. Bionic Bay started as a chance meeting between me (Mureena) and Psychoflow Studio, on a Reddit post showcasing their swap mechanic. We soon began to collaborate, merging their technical expertise with my experience in level design and art direction from previous titles such as Badland 1 and 2.

Creating Bionic Bay: One pixel at a time
The humble swap mechanic remains a central gameplay mechanic, but Bionic Bay has seen incredible growth since we started. We knew early on that the biggest hurdle would be to create environments which provided a challenge without becoming frustrating. In addition, this balanced challenge would be hosted within intricately detailed and hand-crafted pixel-art environments, taking significant time to create.

We approached these development challenges with a simple two-part solution. Firstly, I would focus on level design and art, and Psychoflow would work on the technical solution to make sure our mechanics looked great and worked well. Perhaps more important, we agreed that we would all regularly jump in and play each level, experiencing it just as a player would. We have carried this on all the way to release, and this has helped us to ensure great balance, and that we understand the player journey through Bionic Bay. We all love a precision platformer, but we also wanted to make sure that Bionic Bay provides a unique and worthwhile experience, and that comes down to the game’s core mechanics.

This began with the swap feature which first brought Mureena and Psychoflow together—allowing players to switch places with objects within each level. This was soon joined by more tools, with each undergoing regular playthrough testing:

• ChronoLag, our time dilation technology which allows players to slow down time for a short period. As well as allowing players to navigate through fast-moving areas, it’s also a great way of getting speed boosts to help you get faster times in our ghost data racing mode.
• Power Fist, providing the opportunity to launch objects across the environment. As well as clearing space in the solo story, used in conjunction with ChronoLag has led to some imaginative puzzle solving to speed up your journey
• Gravity Manipulation, allowing players to bend the very forces of reality. This can help to clear paths, or help find new paths. It’s important to be careful, however, as this new gravitational direction will also affect loose objects on the level which can lead to… unintended cessation of all life signs.

Of course, players will be introduced to these mechanics as you progress through Bionic Bay’s ancient bio-mechanical world. Some you’ll be able to use together, and players will often need to combine these tools (as well as quick thinking and precise controls) in order to overcome the challenges you’ll face. As well as using these within our narrative single-player adventure, players can also find our dedicated online challenge mode with Bionic Bay Online. Bionic Bay Online allows players to compete for the fastest time on a course, racing against other players’ data ghosts – something which should speak to those of us racing on PlayStation in the late 90s and early 2000s.

To compete in Bionic Bay Online, players will need to use all of the tools at your disposal, and find creative solutions to take the top spot on the leaderboard. We will also be adding special post-launch content for Bionic Bay, including dedicated time challenge levels to allow you to showcase your skills to the world.

A legendary PlayStation collaboration
We are ecstatic to announce that Bionic Bay also has a collaboration with one of our biggest fans—PlayStation legend Shuhei Yoshida. We’ll be implementing a special level just for Shu within the online challenge mode following Bionic Bay’s launch on April 17. If you take part and beat Shu’s score, you can even unlock our Shu skin, allowing you to customize the look of your scientist for our online leaderboards.

As well as Shu’s own player skin, we’re also bringing you a Deluxe edition of Bionic Bay—with our Classic Monster skin pack. This includes eight costumes inspired by vintage horror (a personal favourite genre of mine), with an alien, a werewolf and more. The Classic Monster pack allows players to unleash a little frightful charm and really sink your fangs into the online leaderboards.

The bio-mechanical world of Bionic Bay opens up today!