If I couldn't slam spacebar to move things along, Biomutant would be made irredeemable by the narration alone. Cute glimpses of their personal lives are interrupted by long-winded lectures on morality, intercut with your character's inner monologue, all narrated by Shaw. They're written more like fuzzy parables than three-dimensional fur-people. When Parker reads these lines aloud I feel like I'm being mocked. 'That's a Pling-plong-booth from the by-gone, back when you needed to cable words via buzz-wire instead of air-waving them' instead of 'People used to stand in boxes to talk'. Simple sentences take a couple seconds to decrypt because every other word is replaced with a complicated compound. The way it's paced prolongs the pain, every conversation opening with a few seconds of cute mutant gibberish, after which Parker reads the text I've already skimmed in the same indulgent full-throated tone and primitive syntax, no matter the context. If I couldn't slam spacebar to move things along, Biomutant would be made irredeemable by the narration alone I never want to hear a Shakespearian voice describe piss and shit as 'yellow juice' and 'brown bobs' ever, ever again.

David Shaw Parker's performance as the omnipotent narrator isn't bad, but his saccharine tone clashes with the fragmented English in the writing, which is often embarrassingly twee. I respect stories that give the void a warm hug, so I'm surprised how much the narration and writing made me wish Biomutant's world ended yesterday.

Biomutant release date