APICO

I ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ love bees.

Симулятор Ющенка. "Будеш вийобуватись - спущу бджіл." © Віктор Андрійович

I like it.

Stardew Valley, but instead of a farmer, you’re a beekeeper. APICO is overall, a chill, relaxing game with a really good soundtrack to back it up. You start out capturing and repopulating different species of bees, which then leads into cross breeding and repopulating once extinct bee species. Eventually you’ll progress to the point of working with moths and butterflies as well, which gives a slight difference in the gameplay loop to keep things interesting enough to avoid getting boring. Fans of Stardew Valley that are looking for something similar to it, should definitely give APICO a try!

beez 10/10

Apico - 7/1/2026 TL;DR: Apico is a surprisingly deep beekeeping game that reveals the depth of its mechanics over time. It’s a bit overwhelming for me, with lots of separate components to manage, but for the right person this game would be a blast. This is one of those that’s definitely a wife-first game for me, so for what it’s worth I did pretty much all of this game in multiplayer with her. Going into this, I was expecting something similar to a Stardew Valley with a beekeeping slant, and I can confidently say that is not what I really got out of this game, with its true nature hiding beneath the surface. Apico is a game I have two hearts over. It’s incredibly easy to obsess over this game, to get hooked on the system of progression, discovery, and accomplishment (a little bit of randomness to spice it up of course). On the other hand, it’s so easy to feel your time being wasted by this game, sometimes unintentionally. I’ll approach the game from both angles here. The Apico I Love: Apico is an incredibly charming little game. The visuals are simple but very appealing and cute. There’s not much in the way of story, but the characters you meet along the way have fun enough dialogue and it gives off a very cozy atmosphere. As you go throughout the game, you’ll unlock the record and cassette players, letting you set the tone of your work. You’re able to fully customize the world to your liking, much more-so than something like Stardew Valley, and work at your own pace, the time of day not mattering to your character. It creates the atmosphere of this incredibly chill game. Apico is not an incredibly chill game, though. Apico is brimming with interesting mechanics and complexity that reveal themselves as you play. The crux of the game is breeding bees to discover them all. Discovered bees create products that you can sell, some with special uses, and many being used to discover other species of bees. It’s got that Pokemon sort of collection vibe going on, but in a way it kind of feels more rewarding. There’s obviously the bees to breed (aka social bees), but also solitary bees that you can find with the produce from the social bees. The world has flowers to discover and crossbreed, and those flowers in combination with other factors can also help you find various types of butterflies. There’s also a whole fishing mechanic to go alongside - which admittedly is super easy. Presentation of these is great - you get a little bee catalog and cute unlocking animations when you discover a new one. There’s also shiny variants of the butterflies, solitary bees, and fish, but they’re not too hard to come by, and getting all of the non-shiny variants gives you an item to help hunt down the shiny variants - pretty nice! Breeding the social bees has you interacting with their genetics, breeding them to modify their productivity, what times of day and climates they’re active in, and giving you real power over the production like you wouldn’t get in any other game. While my wife handled most of the social bee breeding, and I the other aspects of the game, this was great. My wife’s brain clung to the bee breeding incredibly strongly, the system made intuitive sense to her, and she could absolutely demolish creating whatever she wanted. She’s definitely a science-brained person, so I guess I should have expected as much. It’s a game that really sucks you in. There’s not a ton to do, but for what it is it kept my attention fully and I appreciated that. The ability to also self-host multiplayer is a great perk. The Apico I Dread: It takes so long to get things done in this game. Breeding bees is on a timer, finding solitary bees is on a timer, certain events occur not only based on time of day but also phase of the moon. The act of handling a new bee is as follows: Breed or obtain new bee from overworld -> put two of that bee together to make a queen -> put the queen in a box with a limited number of filters -> the queen fills up the filters (can be anywhere from 1 to like 8 per breed cycle) -> put the filters in a machine with a limited number of slots -> crank that machine -> get the product out -> get the filter out and return it to the breeding box thing -> get the offspring of the queen sorted (limited slots). That just sounds like a lot doesn’t it? Compound that with other mechanics, like some bees only breeding when around certain flowers, or during certain times of the day, or certain biomes, and breeding bees at scale becomes a mad dash of clicking around through 10 suspended menus moving items around. The game has light amounts of automation you can do for some of this, but I found it to be a bit janky and it’s also relatively late-game and takes a decent amount of work to create the automations for. It’s only a solution to some of this tedium. My wife, somehow, thrived on this system. I don’t know what goes on in that lady’s head, but I’m sure she’d make for an excellent beekeeper! The game is also full of tons of glitches, at least in multiplayer. Persistent disconnection issues (self hosted or not), records and tapes vanishing from the jukebox, and boats disappearing from where you left them are perhaps the biggest issues we ran into - consistently through our playthrough. A handful of achievements that were absolutely earned also didn’t pop for my wife, although I was able to get all of them. Likely another bug related to poor connection issues. The game also has a ton of items that are useful for nothing other than filling out your encyclopedia, not even worth much to sell. I do understand that it would be hard to make so many products relevant and helpful, but it’s a bit frustrating to have to deal with the storage situation for all of that. In The End: So, yeah, Apico is a game that I had a lot of fun with but a lot of issues with. I definitely think that there’s fantastic ideas at the core here, and if you’re the right kind of person who loves micromanaging everything, you’ll probably love this game (like my wife), but it’s not quite my cup of tea. Overall, my time was definitely positive, and I loved the world I was able to create with my wife.

Esse jogo com toda certeza foi o mais difícil e interessante que já joguei!! Para as pessoas que gostam de aprender e descobrir tudo sozinha, assim como eu, o inicio pode ser bem desafiador, porém depois de pegar as mecânicas e entender como as coisas funcionam, vira um vício, o jogo é lindo, interessante e passei boas horas montando estratégias para lidar com várias abelhas rabugentas ao mesmo tempo. E pra fechar com chave de ouro, tem uma abelha que dropa uma tinta que brilha, perfeição!!

👍

Incredibly rich and detailed

you must become the bee you are the bee always bee i love the bee cozy and bee its so bee i love bees bee bee bee bee