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(+1)

So
As I am (slowly, but surely) working my way through the Demo Disc, Beeknighted got my attention right away, as a child of the PS1 / N64 era of Adventure-Platformers.

Kudos on creating a bee character that I, who hate bees, could immediately kind of love even as a mostly silent personality-void protagonist. The idea of this much smaller adventure happening inside a full fantasy world is neat, and I adore the premise of some enemies being mushroom-zombified insects. That's very neat.

For the most part, the game is great! It controls smoothly and is very fun and interesting and the demo is HUGE, with a lot of awesome content - but there are a few things about it that could see some ironing out.


For one, I found it odd to have the Blast Pods given to you long before your sword, and there really being no tutorial letting you know you could pick up web cones containign ammo or berries - the latter of which you don't get to use in the demo. Introducing a game mechanic that sees no use is a bit frustrating for that. 

Another is that I feel like bosses and regular enemeis alike just take too many hits. The second boss in particular became a nightmare not necessarily because he was hard, but because even when you knew what to do it took ages to beat him or even get a shot at his second form - on top of the range of his attacks being hard to gauge (for me, at least). It was also sometimes unclear on where you had to go next - which I get is a part of the exploration, but if defeating the second boss opens the big gate that leads to the next area, perhaps a cutscen should tell you so. I spent ages scouring every other room for some item I needed or the like without even considering I was allowed to move on.

These minor gripes aside, I adore Beeknighted - it feels very nostalgic to play, and I can't wait to see more. 

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Thanks for providing your detailed feedback! I've received a ton of great feedback from the demo which I have been taking into consideration in updates and changes to the demo content. 

In the future, the layout of the opening caves area will be reworked/streamlined. The general trajectory will remain the same, as the point of getting the blast pods before the sword was to discourage up-front fighting early on and focus more on puzzles, but I hope the update will smooth over the bumps in the flow of the beginning. Gemfruits do have a use near the end of the demo in the optional path on the west 2F side of Antfort, but there will be additional uses for them in the revision.

The difficulty of the bosses is something that has been on my mind a lot in creating the game. While I would like to avoid comparisons to Dark Souls whenever possible, the point of having the bosses be initially very challenging is to push the player to not think about them as duels/sword bouts and instead as puzzles to solve. On the one hand, they can all be brute-forced in a more difficult way, or, once a puzzle solution is discovered, defeated very quickly and easily using the mechanic, providing the option for players looking for more of a challenge. That said, I did recently revise Antonio's behavior to reduce the number of attacks between charges and stickerball drops because as you mentioned, it was taking too long to get a shot at him. 

Thanks again for playing, and hope you enjoy the remaining demos!