Video Game / APICO

The laid-back beekeeping sim.

APICO is an indie simulation game developed by TNgineers and published by Whitethorn Games and released on May 22, 2022. The game is a beekeeping farm simulation about a character that has just left their boring life in the city to return home to their family and take the family job of beekeeping.

The player must use a combination of resource gathering, biology, and a few minigames that are needed to effectively build beehives, breed bees, and allow the bees to fly around and do their work. In addition, the player must also gather items created by the bees such as honey so they can sell them.

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Tropes:

• Achievement Mockery: You can get an achievement for accidentally picking up a storage item with other items or liquids stored inside, dropping the former back into your inventory or spilling the latter all over and wasting them.
• Amazing Technicolor Wildlife: The bees of the APICO Islands come in a rainbow of colors, not just black-and-yellow.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • In the Accessibility menu, you can toggle the ability to walk through trees and auto-activate manual mechanisms to make gameplay easier. They don't affect your progress or lock you out of achievements.
  • The Workbench accepts all items from all open menus, so you don't have to carry the needed items around to use it.
  • When you break a tool, another one with the same function takes up its slot so you can start using it right away.
  • If you lose any key items, they'll be automatically placed in the Lost And Found Box so you can retrieve them again.
  • When you respawn, your boat will automatically be stored in your inventory so you won't accidentally strand yourself on an island if you docked your boat somewhere else.
  • Both the Acclimatizer and Degrumpifier allow you to manually add rain and snow adaptation to bees and remove their grumpiness, respectively. That way, you won't have to continually breed these traits down or calm them with the Smoker.
• Arbitrary Skepticism: Despite having studied various bees with magical properties, Dr. Beenjamin doesn't believe in the existence of bee species associated with the Hivemother, even if you tell him about them. For example, he thinks that the Hallowed Bee is a forgery made by you.
• Bag of Holding: While your inventory menu and the storage menus have limited item slots (and even then, you can carry up to 999 stacks of the same item, except for those that are breakable or liquid canisters, in one slot), the Beebox lets you keep infinite numbers of bees of the same species.
• Bee Afraid: Some bee species are so aggressive, they stop working and won't let you collect anything from their hive unless you calm them with fragrant scents with the Smoker. You can also permanently tame them by extracting the salt from their bodies with the Degrumpifier.
• Breakable Weapons: Each tool has a durability meter that degrades with each use until the tool breaks.
• Bubblegloop Swamp: The Swamp is a boggy archipelago whose lands are separated by patches of water only traversable by boat or rubber ring. It also rains more frequently there, and bees that are adapted to it and its humid climate make their homes there.
• Character Customization: When you begin the game, you are able to create your character from a simple menu which includes selecting their name, clothing color, and hairstyle.
• Checkpoint: Beds and benches serve as spawn points, and holding R (or any button that you reassign this to) for 5 seconds teleports you to the last bed or bench you used.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Each bee species and its corresponding hive has a different color, but since some of them look similar, you can turn on labels to help identify them more easily.
• Co-Op Multiplayer: Up to four players can play in the same world and work together to expand the apiary business.
• Creator Cameo: Mothense, the game's composer, can be found on the upper-left island. They sell the game's OST as CDs that can be played in the jukebox.
• Creature-Breeding Mechanic:
  • Breeding bees involves putting two inside a hive to merge them into a queen, which produces honeycombs (in hives), honey, and special produce (the latter two in apiaries) during her lifespan. After she dies, new bees inheriting her stats are born. Bees can be crossbred to find new species and improve their stats, and the game follows Mendelian inheritance in determining what offspring you'll get. Crossbreeding has a random chance of mutation depending on other factors such as the time or weather conditions, where the offspring turns out completely different from its parents.
  • Besides bees, you can crossbreed flowers the same way. Bees gather pollen from various flowers, which get mixed into seeds when you collect them using frames. These seeds have a random chance of mixing into seeds for hybrid flowers when you extract your frames. Butterflies from butterfly hotels also have a chance to cross-mutate flowers during pollination.
• Doting Grandparent: When you meet your Nana Beelia, she immediately asks you if you're okay and if you're sick and need rest, but she quickly apologizes for getting carried away because she misses you so much.
• Encounter Bait: You can craft incenses that increase the spawn rate of butterflies and solitary bees nearby.
• An Entrepreneur Is You: One of your main goals as a beekeeper is to gather and sell the honey made by the bees.
• Exposed to the Elements: Whether you're exploring the frigid Tundra or the humid Swamp, you're not affected by the climate even in your regular clothes.
• Fast-Forward Mechanic: You can sleep on benches or beds to speed up time, making plants grow faster and ending the current weather. However, it doesn't speed up production time of your beehives.
• Fetch Quest: Once you have discovered at least six bee species, the noticeboard opens. You can fulfill orders placed by your clients to earn money and rewards, usually by crafting them.
• Fictional Counterpart: The news magazine that reports on Beelia Keeper's accomplishments in the apiarist community is called "The Beeconomist" (The Economist).
• Fishing for Sole: It's possible to fish up a shoe along with other junk or extract them from sludge using the Percolator. They're so worthless, you have to pay the shopkeeper instead if you try to sell them.
• Fishing Minigame: You can use a fishing rod to catch fish from deep water. To cast the rod, wait for the cursor to land on the target before clicking. Then, wait for the fish to touch the lure before reeling it in. There are different kinds of fish to catch, each being attracted to different lures, which are made with feathers and bee produce.
• Following in Relative's Footsteps:
  • Nana Beelia is proud that you took after her and her husband in beekeeping since your father wasn't interested in the job.
  • Skipper bravely decided to take up sailing after his father lost a leg to the Krakenbee while out sailing himself.
• Friend to Bugs: Your family members talk highly of the bees and speak very frequently about the importance of bees in the world ecosystem. Truth in Television.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: You're still stuck on March 2, 1994^note the date on Nana Beelia's postcard is written in DD/MM/YY format, the day you arrive on APICO Islands, even if you receive Director Bumblemore's letter about your first rehabilitated solitary bee species several in-game days later, because it's dated on that same day.
• Gender-Inclusive Writing: Since you don't choose your character's pronouns at the Character Customization screen, you're referred to as "they" by the other residents.
• The Ghost: Your grandpa is never seen in the overworld and is only mentioned in passing by the other residents. However, his guide gives you a glimpse of his personality through his writing.
• Global Currency Exception: Rubees are the standard currency of APICO Islands, but Bobbee only accepts Honeycore as payment.
• Green Aesop: You're encouraged to discover and repopulate all the bee and butterfly species of Apico Islands and also find coral islands and work to rehabilitate them in coral farms. In fact, the game is advertised as "semi-educational" to teach beekeeping and ecology in a fun way, and the devs donate a portion of the money earned from its sales to bee conservation projects.
• Guilt-Based Gaming: One achievement you can get early on tells you to "Plant Some Darn Trees" after cutting down many for wood because you annoyed the forest spirits.
• Hint System: The various guidebooks give you hints on how to find new bee and butterfly species in their respective pages. Dr. Beenjamin can also give you hints on some bees, albeit begrudgingly.
• Hurricane of Puns: Expect a lot of wordplay on "bee" in this game. There's Nana Beelia telling you to "bee safe", your grandpa giving you a "freebee" named Beeatrice in his guidebook, etc.
• Infinity +1 Sword: Completing all the chapters of Grandpa's Guidebook rewards you with his axe, which has the same durability as the Honeycore Axe (1,000 hits), but it can also chop down the trees of the Hallowed Island. Grandpa's Axe can also be repaired with honeycomb, which is easier to collect than Honeycore, which is needed to repair the Honeycore Axe.
• Insufferable Genius: Dr. Beenjamin is an arrogant scientist who thinks he's better at studying bees than you, although he begrudgingly supports you in discovering and rehabilitating rare bee species. While he reluctantly gives you hints on how to find them, he outright refuses to tell you where to find the Rusted Bee... when the hint can be found in Beelia's Almanac.
• Interface Screw: There are broken crates underwater, whose item slots are cracked and unusable.
• An Interior Designer Is You: You can build your own house by laying floor tiles and building walls and decorate it with furniture as you please.
• In-Universe Game Clock: The game runs through a day and night cycle with one in-game minute lasting a real-life second. Bees and butterflies also have varying times at which they're active: diurnal, nocturnal, crepuscular (dawn and dusk), and cathemeral (active all day and all night).
• Item Crafting: Crafting materials can be gathered in the overworld and made into new items with various facilities such as the Workbench.
• Jack of All Stats: While some bees have middling stats all around, the Common Bee is noted in Beelia's Almanac to be a well-rounded species.
• Jive Turkey: Your grandpa speaks conversationally in his guidebook and uses slang words such as "aggro" and "yeet", despite the game taking place in 1994.
• Lamarck Was Right: Bees can be put in the Acclimatizer so you can pour water or apply snowballs on them to make them used to working in rain or snow, and these traits are still passed onto their young. This also happens when you tame bees using the Degrumpifier.
• Lore Codex: There are a few guidebooks to help you in your beekeeping career. Your grandpa's guidebook gives you the tutorial on how to gather resources and craft items, Abbee's Folio documents every flower, Beelia's Almanac lists all the bee species you can find and breed on Apico Islands, while Dr. Sto's Journal has insights on butterfly care.
• Lunacy: During the full moon, Honeycore resonates more strongly, charging Bobbee's Honeycore-powered machines faster. The Lunar Bee also only comes out during this phase.
• Mysterious Stranger: A hooded merchant appears in the middle of the night to sell you rare items before disappearing at dawn. If you tell the other residents about them, they have various reactions to their presence and theories about their identity, such as Beetrix and Barnabee claiming that it was the other person in disguise.
• Opposites Attract: Dr. Codey, who studies solitary bees because she prefers things with more "buzz", mentions that her girlfriend Dr. Sto is afraid of bees, which is why she became a lepidopterist instead. Doesn't stop them from going on romantic "research trips", however.
• Party in My Pocket: Literally. You can hammer NPCs into Fun Size dolls of themselves and store them in your pocket until you place them somewhere else, where they regrow back to their normal selves. Their item description even finds it weird.
  Ummm... what??? Try not to think about it!
• Pictorial Letter Substitution: The "A" in the game's logo looks like an apiary.
• Photo Mode: You can press P (or any button that you reassign this to) to turn on Photo Mode, which removes all menus and buttons to let you screencap your world.
• Power Crystal: Honeycore are mysterious honey-colored crystals that resonate when hives are nearby. They are found in the Tundra and Hallowed Island, and their resonance generates power to activate Bobbee's fully automated machines. Honeycore resonate more strongly under the full moon.
• Punny Name: Various residents of APICO Islands have "bee" in their names such Nana Beelia, Dr. Beenjamin, Abbee... the list goes on.
• Real-Time Weapon Change: You can switch between tools in the first 10 slots of your inventory by pressing their respective hotkeys. When one of them breaks, another of the same kind automatically takes its place so you can continue using it.
• Sand In My Eyes: The last chapter of the Introduction section of your guidebook has this from your grandpa:
  Now go little one, bee free. What? No, I'm not crying, it's just really dusty here that's all. Just dust.
• Shop Fodder: Apicola can be shipped to the Mainland for Mainlander Money, which can only be converted to Rubees by being "sold" to any shopkeeper.
• Shout-Out:
  • The intro of the Basic Tools chapter of Grandpa's Guidebook says that you can't "just go around punching trees!"
  • The chapter in Grandpa's Guidebook that teaches you how to make incenses is called "Full-Beetal Alchemist".
  • The Melodic Bee's description wonders if bees listen to The Bee Gees.
  • The Abyssal Bee's description wonders what exactly a Wellerman is.
• Slippy-Slidey Ice World: The Tundra is a snowy archipelago with ice sheets that make you slide around a bit. Some bee species adapted to the cold can be found here.
• Small Town Boredom: Your character has recently moved to the APICO Islands because they were bored with life in the city.
• Somewhere, an Entomologist Is Crying: The game touts itself as "semi-educational", with the "semi" part being Hand Waved with "just don't think about the magical bees" in the game's Steam description. Specific instances of the scientific liberties taken in the game include the following:
  • Queens are produced by merging two bees, while royal jelly is used to turn any adult worker into a queen. Queens also die after making new bees (which are born as adults), when in real life, it's the drones that die after mating.
  • You're never shown wearing protective gear when handling bees.
• The Speechless: Bobbee is hard of hearing, so they only gesture to you when you talk to them.
• Stock Beehive: Both the beehives you can build and the ones you find in the wild look like wasp nests.
• Subverted Punchline: The first chapter of the Liquids section of your guidebook starts with this:
  What's brown and sticky? Well... okay yeah I guess so but I was thinking more about Tree Resin!
• Take Our Word for It: The Captain's story of how he lost his leg to the Krakenbee is only mentioned to be so horrific, it leaves you staring at the sea in fear and wondering how you can describe this to "another living soul with enough gravitas to give it justice".
• Talk Like a Pirate: Skipper and his father talk like pirates, even as modern-day sailors. The former even calls you "matey" when you first dock on the APICO islands.
• Under the Sea: There are diving spots in the sea, where you can find kelp and algae along with underwater bees.
• Variable Mix: Mothense's theme gradually plays louder the closer you approach them and slowly quiets down when you leave.
• Virtuous Bees: The non-aggressive bees are this, but Industrial Bees are the most productive species, having evolved to become more hardworking by being near Honeycore technology.
• Warp Whistle: Discovering new bee species activates the Hivemother Gates in the temples scattered around the world. You can use them to fast travel to other temples in far-off islands.
• You Have Researched Breathing:
  • The game's beekeeping manual starts off with just one open chapter and it covers the basics of how to navigate the game world and how to use a few of your tools. The more you do, other chapters are unlocked and only having them unlocked allows you to perform the tasks they talk about.
  • You need to craft a hammer in order to pick up items you've placed in the overworld and a trashcan to delete unwanted items.