’Biomutant’ and ’Ratchet & Clank’ Epitomize the Gaming Budget Gap

This summer saw the release of two games that feature talking foxlike creatures as their protagonists. Biomutant, the debut game from Swedish studio Experiment 101 has found an audience, though not one that's likely to praise the game without qualifications. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, the latest in a nearly two-decade-long video game series from American studio Insomniac Games, has done much better, commercially and critically—as is to be expected of a technologically impressive, major-publisher-backed release. Both games having furry mutant heroes as protagonists is a coincidence, albeit one that puts the two titles into conversation with one another and, in the process, demonstrates the differences in games made with markedly different budgets and audience expectations.

Biomutant

In Biomutant, the player is cast as a weirdly formed creature, its limbs mismatched and its evolution into a coherent form seemingly unfinished. It may, depending on customization options, have big furry cat ears, tiny eyes, and an underbite; one arm may glow an angry red to denote resistance to fire while the other is wrapped in bandages and clutches a rusty revolver. In Rift Apart, players control a pair of bipedal fox-people called Lombaxes. One of them, the titular Ratchet, is a wide-eyed, floppy-eared guy with yellow fur. The other, Rivet, is a wide-eyed, floppy-eared girl with blue fur. Both of them are perfectly formed, their design iterated upon and displayed in pixel-perfect resolution, to ensure that they form a striking silhouette both in-game and on promotional imagery. Their cartoon features are arranged in just such a way as to look cute and expressive without becoming unintentionally off-putting in the process. Their guns are shiny.