APICO
by Aethyna
Jun 7, 2022 |
1
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92
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0
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10
rate
Platforms:
Genres:
SimulationPublishers:
Whitethorn GamesGraphics:
2DLabels:
Co-op , Insects , Exploration , Shop Design Featuring a huge world consisting of several big islands to explore and a sandbox world where you can build as you please, APICO is a beekeeping simulation game that offers both educational value and relaxing entertainment, an epic combo that's rare in the market. Play Now Similar Games Played
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Summary
APICO is a beekeeping simulation game where you’ll not only get to set up your own apiary, but also discover and crossbreed a variety of bees to gather valuable beekeeping products to sell as well as to conserve the bees. Featuring a huge world consisting of several big islands to explore and a sandbox world where you can build as you please, the game offers both educational value and relaxing entertainment, a combination that’s rare in the games market.
Plotline
You’ve decided to take a break from your busy city work to go back to your hometown on the island, APICO, where you grew up to visit your Nana Beelia, and also to pick up the family tradition of beekeeping. Your nana gave you her blessing as well as Gramps’ old Guidebook to beekeeping that he was writing before he passed. Your goal now is to learn the trade of your family, help save the bee species that have been lost, and to fill up Gramp’s book as you go.
Gameplay
Before starting, you’ll need to set up your character. The game offers some simple customization of your adorable pixel character, ranging from different hairstyles to clothes colors. Once you’re done, you’ll then travel to the island of APICO where your adventure truly begins.
At its core, APICO is a sandbox sim with some idle elements, thanks to its use of automation. In a way, the gameplay is similar to a blend of Forager, Stardew Valley, and maybe Rise of Industry due to its focus on the use of interfaces.
In this game, you’ll get to build your very own apiary from the ground up. You get to design the place the way you want, and you can even “take” stuff from other residents there to place in your very own home. However, to start, you’ll first need resources. While you can grab some of what you need from the crates that litter the village, you’ll want to eventually start gathering your own by chopping down trees, mining rocks, and clearing certain areas so you can build stuff. Of course, you’ll need to have the right tools, which you can easily craft using the workbench.
As the game is based on the concept of conservation, every tree you chop down will grant you seeds so you can replant them, and you’ll do well to do so lest you find yourself running out of wood to fund the expansion of your beekeeping empire!
For someone who has very little beekeeping knowledge, I was surprised to find how complicated the process of extracting beekeeping products from my apiaries can be. For instance, to extra honey from my hive frames, I need to first uncap them via the uncapping bench and then place the uncapped frames in the extractor to collect the honey. Of course, you’ll want to transfer and store the honey in a bigger barrel – there’s limited space after all.
Interestingly enough, it’s not just honey that’s valuable - I’ll also get seeds for flowers, some of which might be hybrids that grant nearby hives and apiaries bonuses, as well as other profitable beekeeping products like beeswax, bee pollen, waxy pearls, honeydew (no, not the fruit), comb fragments, and more. Selling your beekeeping products will earn you Rubees that you can then use to buy items that you can’t craft such as the microscope – or you could just steal the one from Dr. Benjamin’s house, you do you!
You’ll start off doing everything manually, be it turning logs into planks via the sawbench or getting bee produce from frames via the extractor. However, as you progress, you’ll get to craft cogs that will, in turn, let you create crafting stations that offer some form of automation. By “some form”, I meant that the crafting stations will work on their own as long as they get a steady supply of materials, but only after you’ve manually cranked the lever.
However, if you go poking around in the Settings, specifically the Accessibility part, there’s an option where the game will even automate the lever-cranking part of the process as well. That’s the option I opted for since it does take some of the more mundane parts of the gameplay off my hands.
Unfortunately, some of the fairly tedious aspects of the game still remain manual, such as the process of tapping trees to collect their resin. Regardless of the tree’s health or size, you’ll get an equal amount of resin from each tree and the amount isn’t exactly a lot. Plus, once a tree is “drained of resin”, there’s no recovering from that. Usually, I’ll just chop the tree down – and no, I don’t get to recover the tap I used – just so I don’t confuse a tapped and drained tree with a freshly-tapped one.
Besides the tycoon part of the gameplay, APICO is also a rather educational game. The game focuses on crossbreeding bees to discover new bee species that can then be conserved and eventually released back into the wild. This is where everything you’ve learned or remembered about biology – or genetics to be specific – comes in!
Bees each come with 4 main stats, lifespan, productivity, fertility, and stability. Naturally, you’ll want to have as high a number for the first three stats, but if you’re looking to crossbreed, the lower genetic stability a species is, the better. There are also behavior traits that you can crossbreed from one species to another, such as the time of day in which they are active (day, night, dusk/dawn, or cathemeral/around the clock), their climate and weather preference, and even temperament.
There’s an insane amount of bee variety that you can discover in this game, thanks to crossbreeding, and that’s in addition to the various new bee species you can find in the wild, whether on your starter island, APICO, or the other islands nearby. Once you have the idol for a new place you’ve traveled to, you can place it at the Hivemother’s shrine on the starter island to open up a fast travel portal, making it easier to visit your other beekeeping operations.
The success rate of getting a new hybrid bee isn’t very high though since all my bees seem to have level 4 stability, making their genetic code be fairly stable, so some patience is definitely required if you want to make sure you get all the bee species that are available in the game. You could, however, take a shortcut by switching on the option under Accessibility that forces a mutation for hybrid offspring. Not to mention, you can always refer to Beelia’s Almanac to check which species you have yet discovered.
Oh, and don’t forget to put your new bees under the microscope to examine their properties!
Due to the amount of stuff you have to learn here, the game provides encyclopedias-worth – okay, I’m exaggerating, but it’s very comprehensive – of information that you can easily refer to whenever you need to via the icons at the bottom of the screen.
The only bone I have to pick about the game is the fact that you can’t walk through trees by default. This make navigating the forests quite the chore, with you having to stop every few steps just to cut down a tree that’s in your path. Thankfully, the game has an option under the Accessibility settings that allows you to walk through trees. Switching that on removed that minor annoyance I have with the game, making it just that much more enjoyable to play.
Community
Beekeeping is a whole lot more fun with friends! You can play APICO in online co-op mode with your friends. By having a helping hand or two, you can take much of the grind out of the gameplay. Many hands make light work, after all!
Since the game supports mods, you can also opt to add mods to further enhance the game. There’s a mod that adds a fishing option into the game, allowing you to fish and collect a variety of sea creatures that you can even sell for extra Rubees. There’s also a mod for uranium bees and a Hopper mod that further improves the automation of the game, allowing you to automatically move, for example, filled frames from hives to the uncapper.
Graphics/ Sound
If you love Stardew Valley because of its gorgeous pixel art, you’ll definitely fall in love with the graphics in APICO as well, albeit with more muted tones and colors. In terms of sound, you’ll get to enjoy the pure, unfiltered sounds of nature in this game, which matches its relaxing gameplay. The ambiance is just perfect here!
Conclusion
Offering a fun and relaxing way to learn about bee genomics, beekeeping and bee conservation, APICO is a very educational game that’s masquerading as a Stardew Valley-like beekeeping-themed sandbox simulation. There are plenty of cool bee hybrids that you can crossbreed and discover, in addition to setting up and running your own beekeeping empire. Taking into consideration the hours you can sink into this game and its entertaining gameplay, for the asking price, this is, hands-down, one of the more worthwhile purchases you can get on Steam!
Of course, if you’re still on the fence about this, give APICO’s demo a try! It’s free and I’m certain it’ll change your mind.
APICO Blog
New Game Added: APICO
by Aethyna
Jun 7, 2022
Featuring a huge world consisting of several big islands to explore and a sandbox world where you can build as you please, APICO is a beekeeping simulation game that offers both educational value and relaxing entertainment, an epic combo that's rare in the market.
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