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Price: £16
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1390190/APICO/
From the Steam page: “APICO is a laid-back beekeeping sim game about breeding, collecting, & conserving bees! Set in a series of lush environments, APICO uniquely combines resource gathering, biology, and beekeeping minigames, taking ideas from a mix of real-life and fantasy apiculture & floriculture.”
The best way I can describe APICO is to think of Stardew Valley – but with bees. You start the game with a brief story about visiting your grandma on an island. You arrive on the island, and upon visiting gran, you’re given your grandpa’s beekeeping book. This is, effectively, your game tutorial.
Tutorial
Your grandpa’s book guides you through the basics of crafting (cutting down trees, getting planks, etc), and building (floor tiles, walls, etc). Once you’ve got the tools of the trade, you can start collecting bees and building hives. Adding bees to the hive gets you a queen who will make you some honey and output a couple of new bees (bay-bees?). You’ll also need to make sure you have suitable flowers surrounding your hives to get that precious honey that you can also sell.
From there, you can start delving into storing resin, waterproofing your wood (to create better tools), building apiaries (to crossbreed bees), and, of course, buying and selling stuff from various characters in the game.
There’s even butterflies to turn your hand to!
Conclusion
I love this game. There are no time limits. No brick walls (things you must do before you can continue). No complex tasks. It’s chill. Chill all the way. You can easily load it up and tinker for 10 or 15 minutes. Hours even. There’s always something to do. I end up spending a good hour or two going round my hives, gathering the honey, restocking the hives with bees (to get more honey), collecting the racks from my apiaries, restocking with bees (checking their stats to try and up them), then getting the goods from the racks, putting new racks into the apiaries… you get the idea.
There’s a lot to do in this seemingly simple game. It’s not just breeding bees. It’s also about getting them levelled up to get more goods from them. Then there’s flowers. Same idea. You need the right flowers for the bees. You can crossbreed flowers too.
And I’ve not even touched on butterflies yet!
I have to drop a star from it due to some of the tasks being a bit badly worded or badly explained. At the moment, I’ll be damned if I can get some bees to crossbreed. I’m not sure if I’m breeding them wrongly (going from A>B rather than B>A)? But it’s a minor minor nitpick in this relaxing game.