The PlayStation 5 is nearly five years old, and in that time it's amassed a diverse library of games, big and small, which continues to grow all the time.
Some of them can be quite... unusual too. And it is here that we celebrate their peculiarities.
Baby Steps
For a while, Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding was comfortably the weirdest game about a man going for a long walk. But no longer, as that title now belongs to Baby Steps.
You play as a deadbeat, onesie-wearing man-child named Nate (don’t ask questions) who, much to his shock, suddenly finds himself not on the sofa, but at the foot of a mountain that he somehow has to ascend.
In 99% of video games, getting your player character to walk is no more complicated than pushing forward on the left analogue stick, or pressing the W key on your keyboard. But in Baby Steps, a very literal walking simulator, walking is the entire game.
It works like this: in the console version, each trigger controls one of Nate’s legs, while you control the weight of each stride you make with the left stick. That might still sound fairly simple, but the punishing physics system is constantly making your life difficult, so much so that when you start playing you’ll punch the air with glee should you make it several metres without falling flat on your face.
Baby Steps is comically difficult and deliberately unfair, but it’s also one of the funniest games you’ll ever play. Watching Nate slowly tumble down a mudslide at the top of a hill you spent the last 10 minutes carefully scaling can be pad-breakingly infuriating.
However, it all works within the context of the surrealist fever dream that our hopeless hero finds himself living.
Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip
The excellently named Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip is a bit like a miniaturized Grand Theft Auto, except rather than your objective being to rise to the top of the criminal underworld, you’re trying to go to space.
This the ambitious Terry’s only dream in life, and where most would-be astronauts take the academic route, Terry reckons he can pull off space travel by faking his way into a job as a taxi driver and collecting enough materials to upgrade his car so that it can propel itself through the Earth’s atmosphere and into the stars.
The game then, is a very silly sandbox adventure in which you drive around a town and complete errands for the eccentric locals in return for cash or a tip-off as to the whereabouts of buried junk that can be used to improve your taxi’s turbo capabilities. These tasks range from stealing cars for shady alleyway-dwellers to sell on, to mastering a yoga class and warning a sunbather that he’s literally on fire.
Equipment like a net for catching bugs and a glider help Terry tick off his cryptic list of objectives, and while the game is a rather janky and simple affair when held up next to an actual GTA game, it’s short enough that it never outstays its welcome.
Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip’s zany sense of humour, weird characters and genuinely funny writing make it a memorable outing.
Bugsnax
The PS5’s launch lineup had a bit of everything. The hardcore PlayStation-heads were treated to the likes of Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales and the Demon’s Souls remake, while pack-in game Astro’s Playroom and Sackboy: A Big Adventure could be enjoyed by all the family. Then there was Bugsnax.
In this first-person adventure game, you play as a down-and-out newspaper reporter who receives an invite to document Snaktooth Island, a mysterious place inhabited by creatures who are (and this is important) half bug and half snack.
Naturally, you take up the invitation, but on arrival (a bumpy one given that your ship is knocked out of the sky by a giant pizza moth) you learn that the researcher who summoned you has vanished. Now that’s a story.
The bulk of the game revolves around exploring the island and repopulating the central village hub by capturing different species of bugsnax. This is achieved by using various tools to lure the imaginatively designed hybrid creatures out so you can capture them in your net.
If I told you that a particular type of worm on Snaktooth Island could be attracted by shooting blobs of ketchup with your slingshot, but another closely-related insect only likes mustard, then you have a pretty good idea what to expect. And hey, even if you don’t like Bugsnax the game, there’s a chance you might dig its theme tune.
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