The cited influence of Roger Deakins is most apparent in the use of the gritty, washed-out bleach bypass technique the cinematographer helped to popularise among western filmmakers
The premise has us thinking of Another World: a scientist accidentally warps himself to an alien location and has to venture through hostile unknown lands. But it seems this is a science-fiction tale with even more sustained emphasis on the ‘science’, not least what Bionic Bay artist Juhana Myllys calls “extremely physics-based platforming”. To avoid mines, lasers, turret fire and the like, your resourceful inventor can switch places with a nearby object – a chunk of masonry or a crate, perhaps – leaving gravity to sort out the results.
That mixture of magic and reality flows through the visuals, too, as gritty, industrial detail meets traditional painting techniques and pixel art. The game’s grand infernal machines pull from retrofuturist designs in cinema and classic illustration, Myllys explains, while the striking palette and lighting take cues from acclaimed cinematographer Roger Deakins. As for the extreme physics, the coding work is coming all the way from Taiwan. Myllys met his Taipei-based teammates in 2019 on Reddit’s r/indiegaming sub and found their aims aligned. It’s “been surprisingly smooth considering we were complete strangers to each other from the other side of the planet,” he says. As such, we can expect to see Bionic Bay arrive on PC in the not-too-distant future.