Bone Appetit

One of my favorite things about reviewing this genre is the amount of variety I get to see. Metroidvania games span across character action games, role-playing games, and even pinball games sometimes, but the “essence” of what makes them associated with the genre remains consistent; these games are about discovery and applying the fruits of that discovery. Bone Appetit is an example of the purest form of that essence. It wouldn’t make a great action game, or puzzle game, or fit into any other genre on its own merits. As a just a Metroidvania however, it captures everything that makes this genre appealing, and it’s an excellent reminder of why we’re all here.

King Fatass has stolen all of the food in the kingdom, including the stores of a local cultist group. The cultists don’t take kindly to this tyranny (or the accompanying starvation) so they performed a ritual to raise a single skeleton from the dead to go and get that food back for them. The skeleton you play in this game doesn’t seem to have any special powers that typical flesh wearing Metroidvania protagonists don’t have. When you die, it’s game over; you don’t rise back at a local bonfire or resurrect magically. However, it doesn’t take too long to understand why the cultists would prefer sending a pile of bones in to do their dirty work instead of going themselves. The opposing kingdom’s voraciousness has no end, not even stopping at cannibalism. You’ll find dead cultists hanging on spears, pinned to walls, and violated in grotesque ways. As gruesome as that description seems, Bone Appetit is a lighthearted parody drenched in dark and crude humor. Don’t take its “story” too seriously.

Initially it seems like the object of the game is to collect as much food as possible for the cultists. One of the first things you see on you way out of your crypt is a chest you can deposit food into. Once you start exploring the castle though you’ll discover that food is actually used as a currency within the kingdom. Initial progress is literally locked behind you spending that precious food on things like keys or useful upgrades. Since putting food into the cultist’s stores places it there permanently, if you donate too much to the cultists you’ll end up needing to grind monsters for the difference if you come up short on an item you need to progress. As it turns out, your initial playthrough of Bone Appetit is a lot more straight forward; the king has got to go.

Making your way to the King’s chambers is a combination of gathering food for purchases and discovering new abilities out in the open. There are only two or three upgrades and a couple of keys that are absolutely required for you to make it to the top, however. Just about everything else is completely optional. This is where Bone Appetit shines as a Metroidvania game. Every new item creates a spark in your mind on how it can be applied, and this creates an addictive loop of finding new things and racing to all the places you think it might let you access. Occasionally the game gives some pretty heavy-handed clues via text pop-ups about what you can do, but it only shows just enough cards to get you started.

Bone Appetit isn’t the kind of game you should play once and be done with it. Several items are designed with sequence breaking in mind, allowing you to skip expensive purchases entirely, and thus letting you donate more to the Cultist’s treasure horde on any given play through. The food cache can work as a personal scoring system, but it’s meaningful for Bone Appetit’s Oldschool mode as well. Even ignoring that extra mode, it’s just fun to see just how much you can break the game’s world in your favor. My original playthrough took me about three hours to finish, with me trying to be as thorough as possible. By my third playthrough I had the game down to around an hour, with the personal trophy of hundreds of food saved on the side.

Exploring the game world and dominating it is a ton of fun, but Bone Appetit isn’t a perfect game for everyone. It is old school almost to a fault. Your attacks are slow and make you vulnerable, your movement is somewhat janky, and enemy design is incredibly simplistic. Bosses are more about finding the best place to stand to exploit their patterns or just having their weakness and outright destroying them. Platforming can be a little persnickety as well. for example, the high jump ability requires you to be holding up when you jump, which can be awkward when you’re trying to perform the move while running. I suspect that many players will find the clunky nature of the general gameplay to be off-putting, but I’m going to argue that is sort of the point. Most of Bone Appetit’s toughest challenges can be subverted by finding the right item to address the situation, and this places the emphasis of the game squarely on the exploration. Combat and platforming that would be crummy to average on its own merits only makes discovering new tools to overcome the challenge that much more rewarding.

Oldschool mode is the ultimate challenge of Bone Appetit, and it’s the culmination of all your discoveries. The mode starts you out with 999 hit points, and they drain gradually over time meaning you can’t dawdle and still have enough HP to face off with the game’s bosses. The catch is that all of that food you have been collecting in the game’s vanilla mode is now available for you to purchase weapons and upgrades before the game even starts. Some weapons and items are even exclusive to this mode. A few playthroughs was all it took for me to collect enough food to completely crush Oldschool Mode, but just like with Vanilla you can limit yourself to create interesting challenges. Even without manufacturing reasons to replay it, Oldschool Mode is a fantastic send-off for your accomplishments in vanilla.

Bone Appetit may not be exemplary in terms of modern game design proclivities, but as a Metroidvania, it’s great. It provides a very fun open world to discover and deconstruct, and it’s the perfect length to replay and memorize and master. As basic as it seems, it served as a reminder, to me at least, the reasons for why we’re all in this niche in the first place.