BONELAB Review: Competent Quest 2 Game, Depressing Sequel

BONELAB is a competent enough game for the Quest 2 standalone, but it’s filled with drawbacks, shortcomings, and a lack of evolution…

DISCLAIMER: This article was originally published at the launch of BONELAB. I still stand by my opinions though, and from what I understand, the developers have only updated the game twice since then, both of the updates middling. They fixed a few issues, but because the game is flawed at the core, I believe this review is still quite relevant, and accurate. Thoughts from the current day will be (in parenthesis and italicized)

BONELAB is a competent enough game for the Quest 2 standalone, but it’s filled with drawbacks, shortcomings, and a lack of evolution that combined, make it a depressing sequel. Off-Brand

The truth is that BONELAB is a great game for Quest 2, and is a remarkable way to interact with Stress Level Zero’s [SLZ] ‘Marrow’ VR game engine, in all of its various modes. Being able to deliver a product that feels (MOSTLY) like BONEWORKS did for me on PC is an insane feat that shouldn’t go unnoticed.

But beneath that, we’re left with the husk of a game that bends over backward to accomplish the goal of living on the standalone platform, and it overall made me regret that it was designed that way in the first place.

As someone who loved the story/campaign mode in BONEWORKS (and the few mini-quests in the sandbox areas), I was delighted to jump into BONELAB and find a bit more of that. However, there was less than I was expecting or hoping for.

This expectation for a more grandeur campaign was held by a lot of the community (I believe), as BONEWORKS was strongly marketed as an “Experimental VR game engine with a short game attached”. This led me to believe that, well, if dev time for BONEWORKS was all about laying the foundation of the game engine, surely for the follow-up sequel, they would spend more time focusing on making an expansive campaign, right? Well. That train of thought just let me down. It seems as though the campaign still isn’t what SLZ would like to be developing at this time.

While it’s very clear (and understandable) that a large majority of the game is engineered to fit on a standalone headset, the game also takes a bold leap at having a very rudimentary game design as compared to BONEWORKS. Now, I don’t think this is because of the focus on standalone, but rather, I think it’s because of the dev’s desire to get users to make mods and content using their tools. In sacrificing more complex level design, it seems the devs are comically winking with both eyes at you, attempting to lure your mind to creative thoughts with the basic tools they were able to code into their sandbox modes, and the advanced modding SDKs available beyond.

This is all well and good, but if the sandbox and modding were at the forefront of design, I don’t know why the game was advertised as a grand adventure game. You know, like everyone’s expectations had them believe originally? Quite misleading, not a fan of that.

A lot of the game’s design, even beyond those two limitations was very middling, and I constantly felt like the developer’s heads were too far up their own studio to care about players. One complaint actively had in the community around the launch is that returning players from BONEWORKS are punished for remembering the old design of collectibles… where before, you had to take them to the end of an area and throw them into a “bin” to claim them for use in other game modes, now, they’re capsules, which have to be yanked open with both hands. The issue that I and many others had, is the game doesn’t tell you this… so we did the old trick of throwing collectibles in a trash can that we lugged around the first level, and when the “reclamation bin” didn’t show up at the end of the level, we lost out on all of the collectibles we were supposed to obtain. Because the developers didn’t think to explain anywhere the new way of how to obtain collectibles. The community had to come together on Steam and Reddit to be able to share this information with everyone else, and the dev's first patch for the game hastily put up signage around much of the early game to explain this simple concept.

Another example of this dev-first design is there’s a puzzle in one of the levels taking place in a long corridor. Based on the music choice, it seems the developer thought it would only take a few minutes to complete, but, the song looped for me 3 or 4 times before I left the area, and even then, I don’t think I completely understood the puzzle in the room and ended up climbing on the pipes of the puzzle to solve it by brute force.

Brief aside about the music: The album is phenomenal. BONE TONES from BONEWORKS was one of my most listened-to albums for the entire year when I played BONEWORKS, and Michael Wyckoff spared no expense when he made LAB JAMS for BONELAB. The problem that I have is, because of the lack of cinematic, finely tuned scenes and set pieces, the music in-game… feels flat and lackluster. There is one moment in the game, in the very last mission, where the music, the set pieces, and the game come together to make ONE good experience that elevates practically the entire game, but there aren’t any other great pairings like this found anywhere else, which is a shame, because Mr. Wyckoff’s talent is unprecedented… I wish they created a few more cinematic moments for the story so that there could have been a few more musically empowered scenarios in the game to drive home some of these incredible tracks.

Few more gripes. Ammo in BONEWORKS used to be… well, ammo, but it was also currency. The thoughtless removal of the shops between areas makes conserving ammo pointless, which means in enemy encounters you can just go crazy with your guns instead of practicing to be more precise and conserve so you can save for a weapon you’ve never had before (which again, that old reclamation mechanic was another factor from BONEWORKS that incentivized you to use and carry weapons you never had before, here there is no such incentive).

The avatar switching is nothing more than a gimmick. In truth, you only need to be the tall avatar for ease of platforming, or the fast girl (with the boob physics) for quickly running through areas with little to no drawbacks. And, I suppose the heavy, if you’re running low on ammo and need to melee some enemies, which I hardly believe would ever happen. Not only is it a gimmick, but it behaves like a gimmick: switching and using other avatars is as buggy as ever and needs some serious work. Physics and the full-body avatar worked pretty well in BONEWORKS, but in BONELAB, I found myself more annoyed with them than anything else.

The campaign is super short. Like I said earlier, most of that runtime is the developers trying to inspire you to become a modder, and the other part of the time is spent showing you the pre-installed avatars in some kinda lackluster scenarios. The final few levels are abysmal, to say the least. I am not sure why they would have you play as the slowest character in low gravity (which makes you even slower), on a map with nothing to see or collect. I don’t know why they would have you climb a huge tower without including checkpoints, so you don’t fall to the start of an 8-minute climb. I just don’t know. After all that, the game gives you an area or two more in the campaign and then abruptly ends, instructing you to play again (but now with the avatars you just got). It sort of feels like a cop-out of including a good campaign…

What might have let me forgive some of this is if there was multiplayer, or if there was an easier way to get mods into the game, or if the bugs and crashes weren’t there anymore, or maybe some new enemy varieties, bosses, new looking areas, ANYTHING, but at every turn, BONELAB feels like it’s not pushing any new ground with VR. All the praise I can give BONELAB is practically the same praise that I gave BONEWORKS years ago, but there’s less of it because it’s simply less of a complete experience. It’s not an evolution. It’s not a sequel. It’s just another way to experience the marrow game engine on Quest 2.

Which, again, doesn’t make BONELAB a bad game. It has a lot I can nitpick and complain about (especially as a day-one purchase), enough to make me slightly torn about how I feel about it (believe me, I’ve written and rewritten this review 3 different times). But, I’m hopeful, and believe a lot of my gripes can be resolved with quite a few patches, and maybe even some content updates (one year later, two minor patches, and the last we heard was that the devs were working on… better mod support. So keep hoping past-Brando! That kinda sucks!)

So as it stands, BONELAB is a depressing sequel that just makes me long for what could have been an incredible single-player adventure, had there not been any standalone limitations or dedicated mod support. There, I said it.

To that end, if you’re on PC, I recommend you play BONEWORKS if you haven’t, and if you have played BONEWORKS, I’d recommend getting BONELAB at least 50% off or cheaper if you’re itching for more of that (or heck, just mod BONEWORKS lol). Quest 2 users who haven’t experienced BONEWORKS I’d be more willing to recommend the game to, just so you can experience the engine for the first time. But I’m still hesitant to recommend it. Just like SLZ wants, the bread and butter will, unfortunately, be the mods that “fix” this. I would wait until you see something in those creations that interests you, regardless of who you are before you buy. Maybe give it a year (or two!). Then it’ll be ripe… I’d hope.

One last remark here, my one hope is that I have not seen the future of SLZ. At the end of the game, the character played by Jimmy Wong talks about how they’re taking the player character to “the city in the void”. It’s been mentioned that it’s possible in the lore, to create anything in the void. Jimmy mentions that there are all sorts of people and creations there. Now, it’s not hard to see where all this is pointing… the (kinda poorly done) level designs posed to inspire mods and creation, custom avatars… then mentioning a populated city, with all sorts of creations… if SLZ is REALLY working on a social multiplayer metaverse of their own to compete with the likes of VR chat and Horizon worlds, well… then we do live in the darkest timeline… Man, all I want is to be brought back to good single-player game design. All I want is a good, true sequel to BONEWORKS.

Thanks for reading.