Bō: Path of the Teal Lotus

My first hour with Bo: Path of the Teal Lotus felt like someone had folded a Studio Ghibli film into a precision platformer and handed it to me still warm. That impression never fully fades. Squid Shock Studios - a tiny team whose pedigree includes members who worked on the beloved AM2R fan project - built something that looks, at first glance, deceptively gentle. Soft watercolor biomes, an adorable fox-spirit protagonist, yokai with big eyes. Then the platforming sequences start demanding real focus, and you realize this is not a cozy game wearing aggressive clothes. It is an aggressive game wearing the most exquisite hand-drawn coat you have seen this year. The core movement mechanic is the thing you will either fall in love with or quietly resent. Bo cannot double-jump by default. Instead, striking an enemy, a lantern, or certain environmental objects grants an extra jump, which can be chained to produce soaring aerial acrobatics across impossibly vertical stages. It is a reset mechanic borrowed in spirit from games like Dustforce and Ori and the Will of the Wisps, and when it clicks it genuinely sings. The bo staff doubles as an earring early in the game and eventually shapeshifts through tea-powered transformations, which is exactly the kind of quietly odd detail this world earns the right to have. The Daruma doll system adds a secondary combat layer - each doll carries specific attack properties and feeds a heat gauge that ramps up damage as you stay aggressive. One doll fires homing orbs, another rewards tight melee timing. Swapping them at shrines (which also refill your health-restoring teapot) becomes a small strategic ritual before tougher encounters. Boss fights are where the game makes its clearest statement. They are large, pattern-driven, and built around the same aerial bounce logic that governs traversal, so the combat vocabulary stays consistent rather than forcing a mode-switch. The scale difference between tiny Bo and these mythology-sourced giants lands with real visual drama. Save points sit close to arenas, which is a relief given that the final boss represents a notable difficulty spike that some players will find abrupt. The broader world is divided across clan territories - Kitsune, Kabuto, and Tengu - each with distinct environmental identities, and backtracking to previously blocked paths with newly unlocked abilities delivers the reliable Metroidvania satisfaction the genre promises. Collectible Kodama spirits and raw materials feed upgrades back in Sakura City, adding a light hub-building thread to progression. Where Bo stumbles is direction and pacing. The first half of the story is content to stay coy, sending you from ability gate to ability gate without much narrative momentum, and by the time the plot does start pulling threads together the ending arrives in a rush. Some platforming gauntlets suffer from inputs that require multiple simultaneous button presses for what should feel like simple airborne actions, and the map offers less clarity than the genre standard. Critics were split roughly along those lines: people who engaged deeply with the movement system came away raving, while those who found the tutorialization thin felt the mechanics stayed opaque longer than they should. The developer has acknowledged that publicly and flagged better onboarding as a patch priority. One other note worth knowing: publisher Humble Games collapsed just days after release, leaving Squid Shock relying on Patreon support to fund future updates. The PC version has continued to receive attention; console patch support has been more complicated. None of that changes what the game is when it is working. The soundtrack fits the world with the kind of attentiveness that small studios either nail completely or miss entirely - here it is nailed, quiet and ceremonial in the calm stretches, urgently percussive when the bounce chains accelerate. The 2.5D presentation layers hand-drawn characters against depth-painted backgrounds in a way that genuinely resembles traditional Japanese ukiyo-e painting in motion. If you have any patience for a slow opening and any appetite for aerial precision platforming, this game knows when to reward both.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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