When it comes to Bio Inc. Redemption, a game of life and death, the player must, inherently, understand the consequences and weight that comes with trying to save the fragile state of being that is a person’s mortality. After all, even in this new age of better medicines, food quality and general life enhancements, there’s so much tenuous balance to keeping ourselves healthy and functional. There could be any number of environmental influences that can change your world gradually or in the blink of an eye. There are invisible genetic markers that may have set you up for something decades down the road that you could never have envisioned. And, like so many other games, there’s a chance that people are simply too dumb to survive even with the hand of God guiding them to success.

Bio Inc. Redemption is a simulation game akin to Plague, Inc. in which the player may choose the role of doctor or Death itself. Given a patient, players will either be actively trying to figure out how to save this person and get their health back to 100% against a ticking clock OR do the exact opposite. In both scenarios, there are multiple things to consider that can affect how the game develops: dietary changes, risky habits and behaviors, and the luck-of-the-draw that something might just come and throw your entire life’s plan off the rails.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. As either Doctor or Death, the game plays out in a sort of multi-tiered farming outfit. You can move between the different systems of the body (skeletal, endocrine, muscular, etc.) and zap up different…things that appear. Blood cells of different colors are worth one to three points, and these points may become further improved with active and passive skills added into the mix. You then invest these points into one of three categories: symptoms/diagnoses, lifestyle and medical. You can, theoretically, just dump all your points into the first grouping, as that is ultimately what will save or kill your patient, but the other two tabs provide some important ambient help for whichever direction you’re headed.

With Bio Inc. Redemption, the idea is to get good at whichever path you choose and rise through the ranks to basically take on more and more complex cases. You’re not allowed to “graduate” from your initial stage (medical school or morgue) unless you can get so many passing points, and you need to finish at least one stage on the upper medium difficulty to move along. Thankfully, it’s not a totally vanilla experience: besides getting better at utilizing the different unlocks within the main game, finishing the round grants you passive bonuses that lets you choose what to implement before diving into the actual game. Things like “less likely to develop medical complications”, “diagnoses are 10% faster” or, my personal favorite, “cut down the number of potential ailments during diagnosis.”

Straight up, being a doctor who saves people is a significantly more difficult task, and I almost feel like it’s more thankless. The first time I tried the first case, I failed. I failed hard, and this is where the visuals of Bio Inc. Redemption really click. You have to watch the outline of the patient writhe and react as one of their systems shut down, and then begin experiencing graphical glitches (intentionally) as death sets in in an awful way. While some players may not enjoy the visceral nature of the game, I found it to be a compelling way to keep me engaged and actually add gravity and higher stakes to the game.

Plus, when you get something right and manage to nail it the first time, it feels really good. You begin to see common throughlines that allow you to make wild stabs about rare diseases (like hemophilia, which only affects 1 in 7500 men) and get on top of that treatment early. It can feel bonkers at times: how the hell did this guy have testicular cancer, Parkinsons and angina all at the same time but was most concerned about “heavy sweating?” Nevertheless, when it works, it works really well.

What doesn’t work well is the chaos agent that is the patient. I could not believe my eyes when I’m in the middle of trying to save this person’s life because they have breast cancer and they decide, then and there, to become a workaholic. Though it might emulate some of the truth of people distracting themselves from their medical problems through other outlets, I’m trying to do my job here. For one mission, I had to figure out all ten diseases someone had before the timer was up. As I got the tenth one, the person decides – on the eve of their clean bill of health – to become a smoker. 

At this point, I decided to give Death a try.

It should surprise no one that Bio Inc. Redemption gives Death a more enjoyable edge, and not just because I listened to too much VNV Nation in my teenage years. Whereas the doctor needs to react to what’s happening, you, as Death, can sow the seeds of destruction and plan things out more carefully to avoid initial detection. This is where the Plague, Inc. experience really pays off, as you can spend an excessive amount of time sabotaging their entire lifestyle before really going after their health. A person who eats right and sleeps well can probably fight off the flu, but a morbidly obese partygoer who engages in casual sex and also has the “bad luck” toggle? You can see the path ahead, and it’s dark and twisted.

Don’t get me wrong, the doctors and nurses of the AI work faster and better than I do, so Death mode is no cakewalk, but the variables make it exciting. Keep leveling up so that you get more points as you harvest energies across the body. Be sure to time the nurse’s strike just right so that the results of the test are delayed and you can throw in another disease that might muddle the diagnosis. Focus your energy on taking down one system so that the ER is scrambling to get their heart back online, and use that misdirection to create new, different problems that seemingly come from nowhere. It’s a fantastic execution of mayhem.

In either life or death, though, Bio Inc. Redemption is hampered by the actual input that goes into controlling the game. Trying to accommodate both sides of the fence, DryGin Studios made a noble attempt to incorporate touchscreen and button controls, but neither quite work as well as you’d like. You want the joystick and ZR combination to gather energy during the overview sections, but you want to touch to move from nervous system to digestive in time. Diving into the diagnosis dream board means touchscreen to zero in, but buttons to assign the right treatment or test. It’s very piecemeal, and, while I don’t mind it as a Lite player, I imagine it could be very frustrating if this were going up on the big screen.

I suppose, once everything is said and done, I can’t tell if my takeaway from Bio Inc. Redemption is intentional or ironic. After all, I wanted, more than anything, to be the doctor and save lives. It felt too easy and callous to just kill everyone and condemn their life choices, so I was okay with a higher level of difficulty coming from trying to save people. But it became just a series of wild stabs that, if I got it wrong, I just hoped I could get it right the next time through more guesses. Plus, and I can’t stress this enough, when the patients appear to be actively trying to kill themselves while you attempt to save them, you begin to question your entire role in this song and dance of medical care.

So come dive in if you’re looking for a new and sometimes hilarious way to kill people, because that was the majority of my enjoyment of Bio Inc. Redemption.  It’s creative, the execution is decent, and it’s certainly a title that stands out on the Switch. However, if you have any interest in actually helping people, I recommend to avoid this title, simply because it will aid in making you cynical of how much someone is willing to help themselves before asking others for help. Now if you’ll excuse me, a Jane Doe in Bethesda is about to go all in on a high fructose diet…

Graphics: 7.0 Surprisingly detailed and graphic displays of the different aspects of the human systems, the game thankfully does not show the full extent of damage that diseases and inflict, instead just keeping things ethereal and, at times, weirdly visceral.	Gameplay: 6.5 Most of the execution is smooth as silk, but the most important aspect – the collecting of energies – felt oddly timed and almost determined to punish the player regardless of speed and accuracy. Made the whole game feel slower and more frustrating.
Sound: 5.0 Light soundtrack between cases, main game puntuated with EKG beeps, occasional blips to let you know about changes and developments and some thunderous pulse when things get serious. Not bad, but also very stressful and not what I want to hear during game time.	Fun Factor: 6.0 I hate to say it: being Death saves this game. While Life/Doctor mode is full of anxiety and strife, being Death is calcuating, cool and performative. I had a lot of fun with exactly half of this game, and I respect the other half even though it was positively awful to try and enjoy.
Final Verdict: 6

Bio Inc. Redemption is available now on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X, PC and Switch.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch.

A copy of Bio Inc. Redemption was provided by the publisher.