Bonelab review: blandly designed and ideologically depraved

It’s an evergreen question within the VR community: when will the medium achieve mass adoption? Blandly designed, fidgety, and frustrating productions like Bonelab make one think: not for a long time. This hackneyed sequel to 2019’s Boneworks is a ho-hum and depressingly familiar affair, with little to separate it from the tonne of other boilerplate first-person shooters available. Bonelab is one of those titles that’s been widely described using the overused term “physics-driven,” which is a spiffy way of saying that the developers have attempted to simulate real-world mechanics and realistic object interaction.

We play a person situated inside a virtual simulation named MythOS, dressed in creepy garb, with a cross-emblazoned potato sack over our head. There’s little narrative and lots of wandering through sterile laboratory-like environments, where bad guys—shaped like people but without distinguishing features, like the villains in Superhot—walk around aimlessly, eliminated using a range of means including firearms and melee weapons.

The developers claim the engine used to construct Boneworks has been “fully improved and polished,” allowing players to “interact with the game world with consistent confidence” (as opposed to what—inconsistent confidence?). Bonelab’s creators however have fallen well short of their own criteria for success, failing to master even the basics. For instance jumping onto platforms and climbing ladders is far more difficult than it should be, certain to result in lots of fumbling and probably some cuss words. Even reaching for a particular object attached to your body/belt can be bothersome; there were too many times when it resulted in me holding something unintended. 

The academic Mel Slater’s innovative research into VR argues that two crucial factors combine to create realistic virtual presence: place illusion and plausibility illusion. The former is the easy, or easier bit, involving the presentation of a virtual world enveloping the senses. The latter is trickier, concerning “the overall credibility of the scenario being depicted in comparison with expectations.” Expecting to jump but failing to do so in the anticipated way breaks our sense of immersion; ditto for when we fail to do something as basic as picking up a desired object. 

These issues are fairly common in first-person shooters that aspire for realistic object interactions—often to their detriment. Many games (Half-Life: Alyx, for instance) use a “weapons wheel” selection system, whereby a device is chosen from a circular display. After a few times this becomes second-nature; you change weapons barely even thinking about it. Requiring players to go through the motions of actually retrieving something from their bodies draws attention to this process—which is fine when it’s working smoothly, and immersion-breaking when it’s not.

I came to Bonelab shortly after playing Into the Radius, a more captivating FPS with a bloody annoying object interaction system. In both experiences, the strive for realism has a paradoxical effect, reminding us of our mediated existence and severing our capacity to get lost in the narrative world. 

One aspect of Bonelab certainly stands out from other productions—sadly, for ignominious reasons. It begins in a blackened tableau, with the chilling vision of a noose appearing out of nowhere. The player must put their head through the noose in order to progress the game. The blackened space disappears to reveal a medieval-looking outdoor setting with a group of people, many in black cloaks, gathered around us. This is a hanging—and we’re the person about to swing. This moment—which has, at this point, no narrative justification or context, and no trigger warning—goes beyond bad taste, into the realm of sheer depravity. 

Discussions around the psychological impact of violent media representations are complex and thorny. Opinions are many and varied, and cannot be summarised here, suffice to say that nearly everybody would agree that content creators have a moral responsibility to treat particular matters—such as those related to suicidal ideation— seriously. Stress Level Zero has shown us how little they care. In a former life, I worked for a suicide prevention initiative that collaborated with an organisation called Mindframe, which devoted great time and resources to educating media outlets about responsible mental health reportage and depictions. I shudder to think what they would make of something like this.