APICO from Whitetorn Games and TNgineers is a chill and cozy beekeeping sim on Nintendo Switch. Learn more in our APICO review!
APICO from Whitetorn Games and TNgineers is a chill and cozy beekeeping sim on Nintendo Switch. After leaving behind your boring job in the city, you return to your family home in Port APICO to reconnect with your beekeeping roots. The island was once abuzz – pun intended – with a wide variety of bee species, and it’s now up to you to rediscover them, as you gather resources while exploring each biome. You’ll be taking over the family business from grandpa and grandma, who are thrilled about your decision!
The first step will be to create your character. You’ll be able to select its hair colors from a wide variety of options, select its skin color, overalls, and undershirt. Once you’re happy with the choices you’ve made, select your name and get ready to set sail towards APICO! The game will then procedurally generate and build the world you’ll be exploring, planting forests, releasing bees, and setting things up for you to have a good time. Just be patient, since it’s a process that will take a full minute!
You’ll control your character with the left analog stick as you use your tools with the A button, changing between them with the L and R buttons. As you move near things, a tooltip will show up in the corner with more information on what said thing is. Press the A button so that you can interact with the highlighted item. Do this to collect some flowers, scare some birds away from the bees, and more! Press left on the D-Pad, and you’ll get to check the very useful guidebook that your grandpa was writing about the business. There are other books to review, which can be done by pressing up, down, and right on the D-Pad.
The first tool you’ll gain access to is a sturdy axe that you can use to chop down some trees to gather wood and acorns. By using a workbench, you’ll be able to interact with it to work on the recipes you’ve unlocked for crafting other items. The first thing to build will be a sawbench, which is used for processing logs into planks, and planks into sticks. Just place the right resource on the sawbench and then move the left analog stick left and right so that you can cut logs into wooden planks, or cut wooden planks into wooden sticks, which are used for crafting tools… or, you know, to throw at birds to keep them from stealing your stuff!
As for the tools you’ll use, these included the aforementioned axe that can be used to collect logs from trees and bushes, a pickaxe to mine stones from rocks, a spade to dig up seedlings and saplings, and hammer that is useful for picking up the crafting items, beehives and tiles you’ve placed down. You’re definitely going to need one of each, so be sure to collect the resources needed for crafting them right away!
APICO is a beekeeping sim, and that means you’re going to need to find a lot of bees to succeed! The game will get you started with one freebie bee, but you’ll have to find the rest of them out in the wild. There are many species of bees to find in each area, so you should always be on high alert so that you can spot the flying bees, in order for you to follow them back to their hive. At first, APICO will require that you find a bee from the forest and a bee from the shores to get the whole beekeeping process rolling.
Once you’ve managed to find a hive, you can approach it and open it up with the A button to take a look inside. After that, you can carefully take any of the bees inside with you. As mentioned before, you can even use the hammer to – gently – pick up a hive. And since you can’t have working bees without flowers, you should collect some flowers by approaching them and pressing the A button. After you have some flowers in your inventory, you should place them near hives so that bees can visit them. This will help the flowers visited by bees to start to spread and grow.
You’ll later gain access to an extractor, which can be used to obtain flower seeds from hives based on what flowers your bees have visited. Who knows, you might even end up discovering some new hybrid flowers! Hybrid flowers will have an effect on nearby bees, affecting their productivity or even increasing the time they can work, allowing them to stay up at night.
APICO is a chill and cozy beekeeping sim on Nintendo’s console. There’s a lot to do in the game, and the good news is that you can take on this at your own pace. As you craft new tools and items, you’ll also work on making honey and other products related with the whole beekeeping side of things, all wrapped in a colorful presentation for the procedurally generated island you’ll visit. APICO is available on Nintendo Switch for a $19.99 price.
Disclaimer
This APICO review is based on a Nintendo Switch copy provided by Whitetorn Games.
