For Valentine’s Day, we talk to Bugsnax’s developers about janky kisses and love

There’s no beating around the bush—relationships can be, and often are, messy. After all, people are complicated. The worst part is that most movies and TV shows prioritize steamy scenes and well-worn story beats in favor of anything that verges on authenticity or relatability. Then there’s Bugsnax. On paper, developer Young Horses’ sophomore effort is a straightforward “catch-em-all” collect-a-thon that draws inspiration from the likes of Pokémon Snap and Ape Escape. Once you dig a little deeper, however, you’ll unearth a tangled web of interpersonal conflicts and strained relationships. 

In many ways, Bugsnax bucks the conventional trends you might expect. You won’t find any steamy sex scenes or “will-they-won’t-they” moments—or even humans, for that matter. Aside from the titular half-bug, half-snack creatures you’re tasked with hunting down, the other living beings you’ll come across on Snaktooth Island are Grumpuses, humanoid puppet-like characters whose cylindrical bodies and trash-can mouths are a far cry from anything close to your stereotypical Hollywood sex symbol. Less George Clooney, more Danny DeVito, if that helps to paint a picture. 

Some of this can be attributed to technical limitations, especially when you consider the core development team’s small size. As Kevin Zuhn, Bugsnax’s creative director, explains, scripting and animating a simple kiss between two Grumpuses wasn’t the most straightforward process. 

“Getting two characters to interact with each other physically is one of the most demanding things in animation and programming…we generally avoided it. The couple of times we did have the characters kissing, I did my best to position the characters so that you couldn’t really notice how jank that is.” 

With that in mind, it makes sense that a lot of the exposition is delivered through conversations between Grumpuses, some of which the player is actively a part of and others where the player takes a backseat. In fact, there’s very little in the way of agency; sure, there are dialogue choices, and you can choose to transform a Grumpus’s appearance by having them eat specific Bugsnax, but the player has virtually no way to kickstart a budding romance or derail a bumpy one. As Zuhn explained, this was a deliberate design decision: 

“Part of it is…I do like the idea of focusing on the emotion and the mentality that goes into relationships, and I especially did want to focus on relationships that were old, that have been going on for a long time, cause I know a lot of stories like to focus on the start of a relationship or the end of a relationship—the dramatic highlights. But I think it is underexplored to jump into one that’s old and has its own issues but is not going to end anytime soon.” 

This approach also does its job of keeping you, the player, engaged and focused on the long-standing feuds between the inhabitants of Snaktooth Island. A good chunk of character development unfolds between one-on-one conversations between two Grumpuses, which is where you’ll glean the most insight into the problems each of them is facing. 

Take Wambus, the island’s gruff, hard-working farmer. At first glance, he doesn’t exactly come off in the best light—rumor has it that his hard-headed nature pushed his archaeologist wife, Triffany, into leaving him, and that he ruffled more than a few feathers by the way he treated Gramble during a food shortage (Gramble, for the record, is the only Grumpus on the island who refuses to eat Bugsnax). It would be easy to completely write off someone like Wambus, until you learn how bad he feels for the way he treated Gramble or that, to combat his loneliness, he talks to and dresses up a cactus that resembles his estranged wife. Over the course of the story, Wamble and Triffany are able to patch things up, but only after the two are willing to speak more honestly and directly with one another, as opposed to stubbornly holding out for the other to fall on their sword. 

Bugsnax doesn’t shy away from asking you to read between the lines, opting for a more subtle approach to storytelling as opposed to beating the player over the head with exposition. 

“That comes along with a desire in my dialogue to not have people explain themselves in that way,” Zuhn explains. “Not that characters don’t end up explaining a lot of things, because they do, but I would find it really strange for any of the characters to say, ‘Hey, here’s how my relationship is currently.’”

This more understated approach to conversations and interactions not only lends itself to presenting a more honest, grounded take on the messiness of relationships but to showcasing queer romances as well. Historically, western media has framed queerness as a choice or a lifestyle, with plot points largely centered around a character’s coming out scene or how their gender or sexual identity clashes with established norms. Bugsnax, on the other hand, is a slice-of-life tale exploring, as Zuhn puts it, “queer mundanity.” 

“It’s interesting because there are discussions about queer pain and stories about queer joy, but then that leaves a huge middle ground for queer mundanity—just regular life happening. And not to say that nobody’s stories are dramatic in Bugsnax, because they are at times, but there is an awful lot of regular life being lived. As regular as it can be on that island.”   

It’s that phrase—“regular life”—that, perhaps more than any other descriptor, sums up Bugsnax almost perfectly. Once you strip away its bright, colorful graphics and the Pokémon-esque creature hunting, you’re left with the highs and lows that define our lives and relationships. While some of its contemporaries would be more than content with focusing solely on picture-perfect romances, Bugsnax is willing to dive into the often ignored parts of our relationships—the co-dependencies, the emotional neglect, the communication breakdowns—that should be explored more in games.

At a time when empathy and understanding seem to be missing from our day-to-day lives, Bugsnax not only feels more relevant than ever—it feels necessary.