Apico is the fusion of a simple crafting game with a genetic algorithm system. There's a smidge of story in there but it's all just to get you into the core loop of exploring, gathering resources, and breeding bees.
That is the tall and short of the entire game. You craft beekeeping equipment, put bees in and let them pollinate nearby flowers. This produces honeycomb which can be fed into other machines to harvest a handful of resources that change depending on which the flowers the bees pollinated. As you play you unlock new tools and equipment, travel to different islands, find new flowers, and discover new bee species which can be crossbred to unlock hidden ones.
The bee breeding is where the algorithm comes in allowing you to share traits and customise stats, albeit very slowly and with the realistic luck of recessive and dominant genetic traits. This lets you trade tolerances to weather, what times of day they are active, the climate they prefer... it's incredibly in depth but largely numeric and not very well illustrated. I ended up accidentally breeding for less variety and had to spend hours trying to breed it back into my hives because I misunderstood how the numbers work and almost soft locked myself.
It's a cute simulation of real life biodiversity and grows increasingly complex as you play, but sadly the game loop becomes arduous fast. The sheer number of traits, species, flowers, and products requires a vast quantity of the same few machines to sort and manage them, each with limited capacity, fiddly pixelated UI's, and a small resolution. Creating just one machine is a slow grind of making intermediary resources that pad the process and doesn't pair well with the exponential growth, and the bees themselves work very slowly.
Overall Apico is doing some ambitious things but quickly outgrows the limitations of its own design. The variety is almost entirely buried in numbers while you use the same few machines to pump out different coloured variants of the same few types of product. Getting anywhere is incredibly slow, repetitive, time consuming, and labour intensive so if you're not gripped by the core loops and genetic algorithm your mileage may vary.
That is the tall and short of the entire game. You craft beekeeping equipment, put bees in and let them pollinate nearby flowers. This produces honeycomb which can be fed into other machines to harvest a handful of resources that change depending on which the flowers the bees pollinated. As you play you unlock new tools and equipment, travel to different islands, find new flowers, and discover new bee species which can be crossbred to unlock hidden ones.
The bee breeding is where the algorithm comes in allowing you to share traits and customise stats, albeit very slowly and with the realistic luck of recessive and dominant genetic traits. This lets you trade tolerances to weather, what times of day they are active, the climate they prefer... it's incredibly in depth but largely numeric and not very well illustrated. I ended up accidentally breeding for less variety and had to spend hours trying to breed it back into my hives because I misunderstood how the numbers work and almost soft locked myself.
It's a cute simulation of real life biodiversity and grows increasingly complex as you play, but sadly the game loop becomes arduous fast. The sheer number of traits, species, flowers, and products requires a vast quantity of the same few machines to sort and manage them, each with limited capacity, fiddly pixelated UI's, and a small resolution. Creating just one machine is a slow grind of making intermediary resources that pad the process and doesn't pair well with the exponential growth, and the bees themselves work very slowly.
Overall Apico is doing some ambitious things but quickly outgrows the limitations of its own design. The variety is almost entirely buried in numbers while you use the same few machines to pump out different coloured variants of the same few types of product. Getting anywhere is incredibly slow, repetitive, time consuming, and labour intensive so if you're not gripped by the core loops and genetic algorithm your mileage may vary.