Recent reviews by old sport

tldr: BUY IT - also i have some gripes





i've been considering writing a real review on bonelab since launch (both out of blind hate and out of blind love.) since launch, my opinion on bonelab has changed substantially. as a result, this review is gonna be a series of subjective good and bad regarding my experience with most aspects of the game over the years, up until this point.


preamble:
back in 2020, a friend of mine had made some videos on both boneworks and budget cuts 1&2. since ~2015, i had always been a sort of firm believer in the idea of vr being a gimmick (despite loving the VERY gimmicky wii-u). actually seeing some gameplay of many vr titles and the real, raw, viceral reactions from those planted within those worlds made me do a complete 180 and flip my stance on the technology.
i was absolutely sure i wanted to invest in vr.

during the honeymoon period, i was constantly in vr, and boneworks was one of the few titles i played pretty religiously (see my old review of bw to understand how dogmatic i was about it.) i got really into modding boneworks while i was in this period, as i had always loved modding games (since gmod was one of the first modding experiences i had as a tiny little bastard.) finding bonetome lead me into all sorts of tangents.
to this day i still consider boneworks incomplete without at-least having bonemenu.

when i heard about bonelab, ideas and hype around about what it is, and what it could do to the industry were flooding my mind, 'could it really be the next gmod, but in vr?!' 'if it's really good with it's mod support, it could drive up vr adoption by SO much!'
- but so on and so forth.

preamble tldr: i really loved slz, I was really into modding bw, and was really hyped for bonelab :D


bugs:

the good: slz are really quick on releasing patches for most bugs!

bugs are usually fixed within a few weeks to a month.


the bad: there have been miriad of bugs on both the pcvr and quest/standalone fronts.

since i'm lazy, i'm not going to talk about many of the bugs that plague other bonelab players but rather i'm going to focus on my own experience with the bugs of bonelab.

on launch the game shipped completely broken for me. this was a bug primarily affecting those using
index hmds where the controllers would just kind of not track or recieve any input at all. the hands would then go limp... $50 down the drain. what was strange about this issue is that vive users were completely un-affected by this bug.

the bug was fixed relatively quickly with patch 1, but considering the fact that it was so hyped up, only for the end result to be kinda half-baked and inaccessible for most is a little underwhelming, if not somewhat concerning, considering how much work was put into this.

after launch, there were only a few minor bugs which have since been patched, and only 1 game-breaking bug where if you stood on the sloped edge in the just before you go through the elevator into the final level, you would immediately be forced to look down, then the game along with steamvr would crash.

also patch 6 killed most mods made before it's release. sucks for quest players ig.


gameplay and art direction:

the good: i do like alot of what they did and were getting at!

the gameplay at it's core is boneworks. a physical body in a virtual world. what's new is that you can change your pm on the fly. I LOVE IT!

there's not much i can really say about the art direction since i've never been the best at describing themes, but i loved what they were going for! themes of industrial, monolithic suprression against creation and those rebellious against a regime are ones i love.

i also absolutely ADORE the level of optimisation slz has done with bonelab and marrow. fitting the whole game (which at it's core is essentially barebones boneworks) onto quest with minimal visual/performance loss, allowing (mod,io) mod support while still maintaining a good battery life for those on quest is an amazing feat!



before i go on with the bad, what i'm gonna say is honestly really ♥♥♥♥♥♥, so feel free to skip it if you don't care about my gripes with visuals, quest optimisation and some other issues i had with the game.


the bad: look close and the paint starts to chip away.

what was immediately apparent to me was the lighting. it, to me, was such a downgrade especially compared to slz's earlier work, like boneworks or duck season which both have some really good lighting. (boneworks especially had some amazing looking scenes.) looking at the models, it became clear to me that lot of the compromises made were for quest optimisation purposes. (to clarify, I am in full support of quest ports but if the actual quality of the game suffers for those on more powerful hardware as budget cuts ultimate did, then it's not really worth it.)

after a few months of playing bonelab, i started to get a really bored with the level design. for repeat playthroughs, there's like barely any substance, or real reward/incentive given to the player to explore.

the levels get incredibly boring after just your first 2 or 3 playthroughs, and pacing is a slough. (especially unlocking and moving the grav balls in the lab, what the ♥♥♥♥ was up with that?)

comes early 2025, i had been on somewhat of a hiatus from most tech for like a year or so and decided to get back on. reviting bonelab i decided to look at the posters strewn throughout the game. they all felt really nice up until around mine dive, where they began to feel a bit off. the way they were illustrated felt a bit like ai? looking at the text and how coherent it was quelled those thoughts, up until they stopped adding proper text to the posters from street puncher onwards. looking at the posters there and- 'super buger' ... 'poe coltops' ... what the ♥♥♥♥? looking at every illustration and it's just ai. i can understand it from an in-universe sort of commentary on ai from the devs, that it looks like ♥♥♥♥♥ but obviously monogon would use it because why would they give a ♥♥♥♥? (it could possibly real humans emulating ai illustration?)


modding support:

the good: - modding support was a great premise!

the in-built support for modding was the thing that immediately sold me and possibly many others on bonelab. i was enamored with the idea of having a steam workshop (or equivalent) where i could download code modes, weapons, avatars, props and other miscellany.


the bad: - said support is sub-par.

after the launch of bonelab, i immediately looked into modding, and saw that the in-built mods were using mod.io. it was a little bit odd to me why they didn't integrate it into the steam workshop, but i suppose it could have been due to steam's content guidelines or how the workshop it's self works? i dunno.
after a some bit of mod surfing i was disappointed to find that no code mods were supported by the game at a base level, nor were they hosted on mod.io. a little more digging and i found out that we're still using melonloader for code mods.

i'll be honest, it may not be the biggest issue with the game, but the one of the best selling points of
the game is a disjointed and frustrating experience. in my opinion, bonelab (like boneworks) is
incomplete without code mods, like bonelib.

the state of quest modding support is it's own can of worms. mod.io support was built better for the quest due to the nature of the device. from experience the mod.io experience is fine. where things fall apart though is code mods. lemonloader. the site and the support responses from those who run it feel MAJOR sketchy. (ai?)

the installation experience is not much better. (in fact, it didn't even work for me at all; though i'm not sure how much of that is due to the devs of lemonloader or due to meta/android.)

will valve ever become more consumer oriented again?


personally, i loved this game, used to play it daily back when the updates to the game were consistent and refined, nowadays it’s more like a ghost town. I remember when there were consistent newly made (and played) community and official maps/gamemodes. lately, there hasn’t been ♥♥♥♥ that’s anything noteworthy or even a little bit exciting! (I assume that it’s due to the fall off in popularity, which is to be expected from a game this old.) even still, i feel as though that the remaining community members seem like they are still quite passionate about this game even after all these years, which is quite depressing due to the fact that valve does not listen. if valve were to hand over the game’s development to those community members, it would be the best way forward, but since valve is so focussed on money (and whatever the hell else they’ve got on their agenda,) they either ‘haven’t heard the suggestion’ or just don’t want to and won’t outright admit that.

it feels like, ever since valve turned their efforts further towards cs and dota, (♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ games in my opinion) their overall quality control and marketing strategies have just become complete ♥♥♥♥ for the sake of collecting as much money as possible in the most evil and legally ambiguous way possible.



♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ corporate greed, always grabs any wayward soul and just grounds it into the dirt!

a really great experience for anyone in the market for this kind of game. to me the game is timeless, with boundless points of interest within the linear(?) progression and design throughout a playthrough. there are a few minor gripes i have with the game, but most of that can be chalked up to me being a picky ♥♥♥♥ with games and control schemes; though i wanna disclose that there are a few moments where either i’m really stupid or it just feels like it’s either bad design, and or a bad concept.

final verdict: i think it’s worth your money and time, go play it whenever you think is right!

This is a REALLY fun game, everything to the physics to the INSANE levels of realism they took to ensure that you HAVE a physical body that can actually INTERACT with the environment around it and not go through walls. The puzzles are also really fun, especially the physics type puzzles. The movement system is also implemented very well, you actually have analogue movement with the thumbstick (or trackpad for VIVE users) in the direction you push it, as opposed to other VR games which used teleportation, at the time of it's release. The combat system is one of the best in any game ever, instead of going into an inventory and selecting weapons, you grab them from a holster from either your shoulders, hips or back and the way you engage in combat is so realistic, you just hit the enemy with either your fists or a melee weapon or shoot them with the wide array of weapons that are included in base game (not to mention you can mod the game.) This game was called "The Half-Life of VR" by most people BEFORE Half-Life Alyx Came out, just shows how GOOD this game really is. If you have VR and are contemplating getting Boneworks then, BUY IT NOW unless you have a weak stomach and or get motion sick easily.

this game is a testament to everything i hold dear and near to my heart, for it's community knows no bounds in what is sacred and what is not