Where the Bees Make Honey

My spreadsheet instincts told me to look at the numbers first: 41% positive on Steam across 36 reviews, "generally unfavorable" on Metacritic, and a runtime that trophy guides clock at around 40-75 minutes depending on how many times the geometry swallows you whole. Those numbers tell a story before you even boot the game. That said, I spent time with it anyway, because sometimes the numbers lie. Here, they do not lie, but they also do not capture the full picture. The core concept is legitimately interesting. You play as Sunny, a burned-out office worker who mentally retreats into four childhood memories, one per season. The connective tissue between each memory is an isometric puzzle segment where you rotate a miniature 3D world in 90-degree increments, walls becoming floors, ladders aligning across rotations, all to collect three honeycomb pieces per level. The developer cited a Rubik's Cube as the inspiration, and when these sections work, you can feel that spatial logic clicking. The puzzle design is not deep by any standard, but it has a clean, readable quality that makes you wish the entire game were built around it. It is not. The rest of the experience is a rotating carousel of genre experiments, none of which are finished. A 2.5D platformer section transitions into a rabbit-hopping level with tank-style turning and a camera that fights you at every corner. Then comes an RC car segment where flipping over means spinning in place until the game decides to teleport you to safety, if it decides at all. These sections are not challenging in any interesting way. They are frustrating because the controls are unresponsive and the collision geometry is porous: Sunny clips through floors, invisible walls block movement with no warning, and rotation triggers sometimes simply refuse to fire. A post-launch patch addressed some complaints, but players reporting issues years later suggest the fixes were partial at best. The narrative framing has potential. Voice actress Alex Wisner delivers Sunny's adult monologue with real weight, and the seasonal structure gives the game a tidy shape. The audio design is one of the few consistent wins, with distinct instrumental tracks per section and a creepy-charming song during the Halloween level. Visually, the game swings from the detailed realism of Sunny's office to deliberately cartoonish childhood vignettes, a contrast that works thematically but feels inconsistent in execution. The comparison to What Remains of Edith Finch gets made by multiple reviewers, and it is an instructive one: that game also shifts genres between vignettes, but each mini-game is polished and purposeful. Here, the genre shifts feel like scope decisions made under deadline rather than design choices. For the audience this targets, which is roughly the same crowd that played Gone Home or Firewatch for the walking-sim atmosphere, the honest advice is to manage expectations hard. The isometric puzzles are worth playing. The rest is a first-game rough draft from a solo developer who clearly had ideas but ran out of runway to execute them cleanly. If you are in a completionist mindset, the achievement list is short and the platinum-style runs clock under an hour, so the ceiling on frustration time is low. Anyone expecting a polished narrative puzzle experience comparable to what the genre's best titles offer will leave disappointed.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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