Kabuto Park

A cute, fun, simple game. My favorite part is the part with the bugs.

This scratch the clicking itch I've been having. It's a great relaxing and chill game to just zone out and play. The premise is pretty simple catch bugs and battle other kids. To catch bugs it's a timing puzzle that get progressively more difficult. You can make different bug team ups work depending on you play style. I played with with controller but you could easily play this with keyboard an mouse. I chose controller mostly to sit back in relax. The difficulty is a slow progression. There is a little bit of end game content for those who want a challenge and to test different line ups. If you've never tried a turned based RPG then this is a great entry point to help you get familiar with the genre. The stakes are pretty low so take your time enjoying the game.

The strongest bug in this game is the earworm you'll catch from its soundtrack.

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Kabuto Park is not simply cute, it feels like actual storybook grade ART. It was clearly designed with so much love that it's a genuine delight every time you unlock a new area or catch a new bug and get to see the artwork. However, a couple of game mechanics are so unbalanced that it spoiled my proverbial day in the park. To start, it takes expensive upgrades to unlock new areas and you can only catch bugs in tiny batches, so you really have to grind the same places over and over again as many times in a row as you can stand. You do this with the hopes of catching rarer bugs with good stats and being able to upgrade them enough to be ready for some more boss battles. (Yes, your bugs are like a simplified Pokémon team; you can name them and everything. It's adorable.) But the repetition starts to wear thin early on, and the final bug fight is so many orders of magnitude harder than the others, it made me doubt what kind of game Kabuto Park was trying to be. Is Kabuto Park a whimsical casual game that will appeal to younger players and anyone who likes the art and subject matter? Or is it secretly a merciless grind that lulls you with a false sense of accomplishment up until its final moments, where, expecting to be met with the end credits, the final boss instead pummels you once more, and you start doubting you'll "GET GUD" without going online to research the meta and the S-tier bugs. I honestly don't know the answer, because after trying it a few dozen times with different max-leveled teams and strategies, I decided to just call it a day and uninstall. I still have some fond memories of Kabuto Park, but I have a hard time knowing who exactly I could recommend this game for.

A short, very cute, and relaxing game to pass the time. I like the bug-teaming aspect; it could have a little depth.

cozy and simple game and some shiny hunting