You see far more of Hayes (Diva) than you do of Alora (Aguiluz), but both characters are so forgettable that I had to Google it to figure out what their names were. The main interaction comes from your real-world friends Hayes and Alora, played competently by YouTuber Mike Diva and actress Heldine Aguiluz, who speak to you through monitors you find as you progress through the story. Being partial to consistent action in my action-adventure games, I was pleased to find that there aren’t a lot of characters to talk to or exposition dumps to slow you down. There are some autosave points strewn throughout each level, but they act more like respawn points rather than dedicated save files, and you can’t manually save at a certain spot to come back to it if you mess something up.
That’d be forgivable and even funny if not for the fact that if you leave Boneworks or need to restart in the middle of a level because an item you need was lost, you’re forced to go back to the very beginning. The latter problem happens often, when limbs and meshes get stuck inside one another, or when enemies trip over loose objects or even other enemies. However, MythOS’s intentionally low-fi aesthetic and constant fourth wall-breaking gags barely excuse the fact that you can easily break the level design by losing key items if you aren’t careful, and even the physics systems that tie the whole game together are precariously shakey. The convenient fact that it takes place in a “virtual” virtual world is a tolerable gimmick for letting Boneworks get away with consistent jankiness mixed with some inconsistent art direction and minimal plot. You wouldn’t even know your character’s name, for example, without doing some extra digging or paying extra close attention to the clues left in the environment.
It strings itself together on style and clever use of physics, but fails to say much about its own world or lore.
At best, Boneworks has something of an anti-plot. This is only loosely explained, and your own motivations remain pretty unclear throughout. “Your mute protagonist is a computer hacker who broke into the VR world of MythOS to “reset the clock,” whatever that means. There’s also a pretty cool original retrowave soundtrack by Michael Wyckoff, and it adds flavor to the overall ‘Half-Life meets Tron’ style that Boneworks is shooting for. I was pleased to discover that there’s quite a thick campaign to progress through here, sprawling across nearly 13 different levels. And while its mechanical ideas and atmosphere aren’t the most original, Boneworks’ best physics-driven moments manage to make VR feel more tangible than any other action-adventure game to date.Physics-based arena games like Blade & Sorcery and Gorn have been a favorite of VR enthusiasts for years now, but Boneworks is the first VR game to take the idea of giving you a variety of objects, each with their own distinctively modeled weight and heft, and then use those as the components for solving single-player puzzles and combat. Boneworks, by developer Stress Level Zero, is a clear homage to that and several other Valve classics. What happens when you throw headcrabs, crowbars, and advanced physics puzzles into a dystopian cityscape? If the first thing that comes to mind is Half-Life 2, you’re only half right.