Bugsnax’s Ending Was Originally Even Darker, Here’s Why It Changed

“I was confronted with the fact that this story would be better if Eggabell was a character who got to be in it.”

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That “trope hole” Zuhn is referring to is realizing they had inadvertently played into the Bury Your Gays trope in his original draft. In part, they attribute that realization to teammates like story editor Sage Coffey and others, who helped Zuhn realize the script played into a trope that sees LGBTQIA+ characters having love interests killed off as little more than motivation to another character in larger numbers than cis-gendered characters. By recognizing that the script played into that trend, which Zuhn of course wanted to avoid and move away from, Zuhn emphasized how it only made everything about Bugsnax’s story better to bring Eggabell more concretely into the game..

“Some of the members of my team had already told me, ‘This is a bad trope.’ But when Sage [Coffey] came on as the story editor, the first thing they said needed to change was [Eggabell’s off-screen death]. Sage was like, ‘This is the worst part of the story. You should do something different.

“That [original ending] by itself was a real nasty bummer of a story, but also in the context of the wider media landscape, is a thing that happens too much. And here, the story itself became stronger and better when I avoided doing that.”

How Story Informed Gameplay, and Gameplay Informed Story

Making Eggabell an active, independent participant in the events of Bugsnax’s current narrative translated into several major creative changes that allowed for a much more cohesive third act, one more connected to the DNA of the entire game. One of those changes was a huge structural shift, because if it weren’t for Eggabell’s proper introduction, players wouldn’t necessarily have that much to do in the last stretch of Bugsnax as they reached the Frosted Peak.

“[The Frosted Peak section] was just kind of a big blank hole in the story. You get up there, nothing happens, there’s a mysterious door and you don’t know what it is or how to open it. And it is almost bizarre the extent to which [I realized] ‘Well, Eggabell is alive, she’s there. She can tell you about the door and how to open it and why you should open it because she thinks Lizbert’s behind it.’ Eggabell can explain to you the events that occurred on that mountain that got Lizbert stuck in the UnderSnax.

“And at the same time that really, really changed Lizbert’s attitude going forward in the story, because in that first draft, meeting Lizbert, she’s really upset and almost angry. There is pretty much no resolution to her story because too much has gone wrong [in the original draft].”

As Zuhn explained, the addition of Eggabell benefitted nearly every facet of the story, the game’s structure, and in offering the player more reasons to actually care about and understand their journey.

“A lot of her struggle is with her feeling of self-worth, she struggles with a lot of depression as many of the characters do. But for her in particular it’s more debilitating. I thought of Eggabell as someone who really embraced coming to the island as an opportunity to change herself because that is what she wanted to do more than anything, is to not be herself anymore. It’s just that she made the choice of turning herself into Lizbert, which was the wrong choice,” Zuhn said of Eggabell’s characterization.

And as Zuhn began to bring Eggabell to life in later drafts, quite literally, it allowed for the player’s connection to the mystery of Lizbert’s disappearance to become more grounded and understandable in the grander scheme of things.

“In the [final] version where Eggabell is looking for her, they can meet again and they can reconcile the problems they were having. And both of them have the opportunity to move forward, which is a lot more in keeping of where the story actually goes,” Zuhn said, also noting that, for players who think Lizbert and Eggabell meet a grim end, that is not the case.

“After all of that some players are confused and do think that Lizbert and Eggabell die at the end but they don’t. They’re alive.”

Giving Eggabell and Lizbert the same emotional depth as the rest of the cast ultimately tied into Zuhn’s overall goals in depicting the ensemble battling with their personal demons. From the first to the final draft, all of the characters grow from more archetypal figures to well-rounded, nuanced characters with fuller arcs. Zuhn recalled one experience that really informed this mission.

“We had the early version of the Garden Grove and you would meet up with Wambus and do these quests. [Producer and Programmer] Kevin Geisler’s dad played it. Kevin Geisler’s dad is a farmer by trade.

“He played it and he made the comment to Kevin, ‘You made the farmer stupid.’ And that hit me, because I thought, ‘Oh well, I didn’t mean for Wambus to come off as a stupid character.’ But I understand that I’d written him in a way that isn’t empathetic enough to what his problems are and how he feels.”

Zuhn explained that they still wanted to make Wambus, and every other Grumpus, fallible, and still bring their unique personalities to the game, but they aimed to do so with more empathy than before.

“I reworked a lot about his character. He’s still Texan. He still has a farm, etc. But I wrote in a way to make sure that he was empathetic and relatable because any character that I put in this story, someone is going to relate to them and they don’t want to see themselves made fun of.

“I think once I understood that was my mission… they grew. It’s not that I had to completely rewrite anybody, but me understanding them better helps the audience to understand them better.”

Return of the Living Bugsnax

The dramatic changes to Bugsnax’s ending kept coming, though. In the original script, one of several endings could occur: the neutral ending sees whatever Grumpuses survive fending off zombified Bugsnax versions of the Grumpuses who do not survive, before deciding to leave the island; the bad ending sees every Grumpus but Filbo transform into a zombie and after a short chase, Filbo sacrifices himself to save the player, who returns home safely, but without much evidence of what has happened; and in the good ending with no zombie Grumpuses, everyone but the player decides to stay on the island and try to make life work, knowing that they just can’t constantly eat Bugsnax as they were. And that major battle in Snaxburg? It didn’t exist at first, and at one point even took on more of a tower defense mechanic.

Zuhn explained how these original endings were born largely of the same idea that made it into the final game, but that they didn’t really quite gel narratively and mechanically.

“Our thinking going into this first draft was that we knew the game was going to have a dark ending because we knew that Bugsnax were not good. You should not be eating them and that there would be consequences for having done so. And that was why initially… shit goes bad.

“It goes wild, everyone eats each other at the end, but I think it was apparent pretty early on that, though that is very shocking, it’s not fulfilling. It doesn’t do anything with the theme.”

Much of that thematic work was making sure the Grumpuses and the journey you went on with them had some emotional “reckoning” – there had to be a reason you all went through this harrowing ordeal, otherwise it lessed the player’s reasons to care about any of it.

“Everyone just turning into zombies didn’t really give any of them a reckoning with their personal demons or put any focus on them as characters,” Zuhn said. “It was just a bad thing that happened to them. And it’s antithetical to where we ended up going because Bugsnax, as it is in release, is so much about the characters and their journeys as people. I wanted to do a version of the ending that actually involved that.

“And granted, they do come after you at the end of the game right now, but that’s a physical manifestation of [Bugsnax’s true nature],” they explained. “What really matters is that if you take them, you’ll lose yourself. And the zombie thing, the threat of this is that they were zombies, that they’ll bite you, and that’s nothing.”

That nothing became very much something that tied into the entire journey that preceded it – with the introduction of the UnderSnax and the added focus on Eggabell, Zuhn and the team figured out how to weave the ending more directly into the emotional patchwork of this ensemble story.

“The way to get at the heart of it was to say any physical change happening on this island is a result of the Bugsnax themselves. They are the heart of everything on this island, and that helped shape the way the ending happened because one, Bugsnax come out of this underground. They can be everywhere. There’s kind of no escaping them. And because there’s this big underground network of Bugsnax, Lizbert has a connection to them throughout the island. This explains how she’s been able to keep them in check this whole time. And then, also this speaks to the aspect of willpower having an effect on them,” Zuhn noted, reflecting on the willpower most of the island’s denizens didn’t have to stop consuming Bugsnax at that point.”

Another major aspect of solidifying not just the ending, but of the entire game, was in deciding who the player character actually was. The original draft sees the player as no one in particular, and various other roles were attempted, including making the player related to Lizbert. But as Zuhn noted, that didn’t leave much room for mystery.

“We wound up at journalist after trying these other ideas because we thought it was the right career for someone who is going on an investigation, who will say, ‘Oh, there’s a mysterious island and a bunch of mysterious characters that I want to know about,’” Zuhn explained.

“You’re not just a journalist, you’re a journalist who is in a lot of hot water and really needs this to work, to kind of also nail in that part where you two are like the rest of the characters in this story. Someone who has come to the island trying to make up for something in your life.”

All of that motivation, Zuhn said, cleared up a lot of playtesting misconceptions about why this journey mattered and, again, aimed to bring more emotional resonance and importance to every interaction. That included the interviewing mechanic – while, yes, the game previously had dialogue interactions, the concept of really digging into these characters “crystallized around your role as a journalist.”