There’s something very Saturday morning about Biomutant that has always really appealed to me. Where other open-world games can be grim, this is exuberantly colourful; where other games can be bogged down in grit, this is light and full of energy.
Biomutant interviewDeveloper: Experiment 101Publisher: THQ NordicAvailability: Out on PC, PS4 and Xbox One 25th May 2021
It looks like a child’s imagination exploded all over the screen. Mutated animals tear about, kung-fuing gigantic monsters with three heads, which are also adorable, and there are outlandish contraptions, DIY guns and vehicles to use. There’s one vehicle that looks like a hand and moves around like Thing from The Addams Family, and finger-guns enemies dead. There are others that fly through the air or speed across the water, as you whizz around over-saturated and kaleidoscopically vibrant worlds.
That’s not to say I ever thought Biomutant would change the world. I never really thought of it as a blockbuster. But does everything have to be? They can be so timid. This feels reckless, charming, and it abounds with a kind of breeziness I am totally here for in 2021, with all this going on, .
But where did Biomutant go? I remember the announcement in 2017, and I remember the original 2018 release date. That obviously didn’t happen. Nor did the subsequent 2020 release date. And each time it slipped, it slipped from memory too. But now, Biomutant is back, firmly on the release schedule for this year, 25th May 2021. What kept it? I sat director and Experiment 101 founder, Stefan Ljunqvist, down for a chat.
One thing that makes immediate sense when you meet Ljungqvist is where the game’s love of kung fu comes from. It’s him – it’s him all over. He is all about kung fu, Sanshou in particular, a kind of Chinese kickboxing. He’s been practising for nearly 20 years. He goes off to muay thai camps in Thailand to train in it, he spent a year training intensely with a Shaolin Monk, and during his decade at Avalanche making Just Cause and Mad Max games, there was a time when he was training five times a week for two-and-a-half-hours a pop. He’s serious about it. How good is he? “Well, I… I can do it,” he says, in that self-deprecating way people who can really do something do.
Sadly at 48, his body has other ideas, and in 2019, it rebelled. He ruptured his calf, got his cheek crushed by a knee, and he has something called ‘boxing wrists’, which is micro-fractures in the tiny bones there, and one swelled up like a golf ball. “Those three things alone was like a sign that I had to stop,” he says. But – well, we’re our own worst enemies sometimes – he didn’t. And then he “destroyed” his back. I don’t know exactly what happened but it left him requiring surgery – spinal surgery – and months of rehabilitation. And that, on top of everything else, was his 2020.
It goes a small way to understanding why the game has been delayed, because when your writer (and director) can’t finish the script because he’s laid up in bed after back surgery, there’s not a lot you can do. Especially when you’re only 20 people – I didn’t realise that. That’s a much smaller team than I thought.