Bō: Path of the Teal Lotus Steam Charts & Stats

Overall great delivery, good "metroidvania" though it felt a bit linear. You can make it harder by forgetting to upgrade your teapot and staff at the city like I did...

Hollow Knight meets Ori with an Okami aesthetic. I enjoyed this a lot. One of the best metroidvania I've played. It is heavily lean from the platforming side while combat is fairly easy. The art style and soundtrack are absolutely gorgeous. Movement is smooth and fluid and all in all, very enjoyable game. Highly recommended for any metroidvania player but get your expectation right, this is NOT a combat heavy one.

This game has a lot of potential to be great but for now if I rate it I would say 3/5. Why? It was boring at first (maybe because I was interchanging this and Ender Magnolia that somehow I was comparing them). Took me a while to win on the first boss fight. After some going around the map I finally got into the Bridge! That I would say was the best part of the game! I was craving the same on the next maps but sadly it ends there :( My excitement was cut short. One more thing, the map was too short. I hope if this gets a second game there will be more! (Lots of people in the credits for just a few maps :P) Overall, the game is okay as entry level Metroidvania but I'm looking forward that this gets better. PS: The graphics are superb!

Some of the controls are frustrating and the game is a little short. I beat the game 90% complete at time of review. However the overall game is good.

The game is good Its Platforming and verticallity is its strong point. The R1 dash for midair combat is sometimes unresponsive. This can be very annoying since it is intrinsic to certain bossfights When you fail to platform and hit spikes or fall down a pit, it will fade you to a platform. Please make it so its the last platform you landed on. I should not have to repeat several sections of it again because I got shoved off to the start of an area again when there is perfectly safe areas along the path. The little powerup dolls are neat with them getting stronger when you land hits in midair The Onimori charms or talismans are kinda lame. For one they lack the flexibility of something like Hollow Knight Charms but thats forgivable to me. What is not, is that they are almost all bought from stores. You cannot call this a metroidvania and have like 25% of your collectibles be in a store gated by foxfire. You will get like 10-13 hours out of this and for what it is, it is very good. I like the art and the gameplay. This is a very solid baseline and I hope that if there is a sequel it takes it to the level it could be. Also please allow us to skip the endgame credits. I will be honest I do not care about the staff. It sounds harsh but its true. Forcing me to look at all these names go by is not going to make me look them up for future projects. Just allow me to access the credits from the main menu and skip to the end if I want to.

The Celestial Garden is in dissaray. The Sakura Shogun and his advisor are unable to contain the creature of malice that is threatening the realm. The spirits are scattered. The sun goddess sends a portion of her power into a new tentaihana- a blossom-fox spirit creature. Bo is tasked with uncovering what threatens the land and eventually saving it. Mechanically, the game is a metroidvania. What's unique about it, is that almost anything you hit, gives Bo and extra jump. This makes platforming very unique, as you can jump, hit an obstacle overhead, jump again, hit it level, jump again, hit it downwards, jump again, etc. Staying airborne while hitting things is the name of the game here, and the developers do a lot with this concept- from escape sequences to most of the bosses. The game has several robust upgrade systems and rudimentary crafting- upgrading your health requires bringing ingredients to a noodle stand to cook new dishes, while you gain upgrades and heal yourself by brewing tea. The game's artstyle is lovely, and it's one of the prettiest metroidvanias out there. While the combat isn't particularly challenging once you get the hang of it, there are several endgame challenges (such as going though a platforming and enemy gauntlet without taking a hit) that may test your patience. The game presents a decent enemy variety and a very unique NPC cast. While the story isn't much in and of itself, the character writing fits the theme well, and overall leaves a very pleasant impression.

Nice art style and very cool platforming mechanics/challenges. Sometimes when soaring through levels, it reminded me of Ori. The Pogo, which I first encountered in Hollow Knight, is very well integrated in almost all challenges. Combat is pretty good. I believe it's because you're mostly airborne, especially in the late game and the platforming is great. Would recommend if you enjoy Metroidvanias!

Going to keep this review short and to the point. [h1] PROS [/h1] • The art is VERY pleasant. It's hand drawn art is amazing. • The music is very appropriate. It fits the mood and it well done. Hats off to the musician. • The theme is on point for what it wants to achieve in it's Japanese theme. • The platforming segments are fun and definitely test your skill. I had a LOT of fun with them. The best part of the the game. It's very Hollow Knight meets Ori with Celeste elements sprinkled. [h1] CONS [/h1] • It's good, but almost a blatant ripoff of Hollow Knight in so much • The games trinkets (Oromanu?) don't make the player feel good. They give you buffs in probably the most bland way possible. It's like drinking a soda with it 90% ice. • The story is forgettable and dialogue is way too drawn out. It's like reading a book sometimes and in the worst areas. For example, an area is being destroyed by a monster and they want you to read 2 chapters to a book while at the end it says "We must hurry". It kills the pacing and immersion. • The controls are not tight or responsive compared to it's peers. I cannot tell you how many time I died to it prompting me to launch and it just didn't register while below was 1-hit deaths. That's not a 'me' problem. It's a 'fix your game' problem. • The story is a dull Ori rip off - Just play Ori and the Blind Forest instead. • The game devolves into a 1-hit death scenario for artificial difficulty. You end up losing traction and progress in the game either via 1-hit deaths by the ground or from later bosses attacks. So the time you spent gathering and upgrading your health bar is somewhat irrelevant. • The upgrades to your weapon make almost no difference. I Spent the time to upgrade my weapon to full after 3 upgrades and notices almost no difference. If anything, you maybe kill an enemy with 1 less attack after an insane amount of time and collecting. Very depressing. • The game crashes KILL the game. It only happened twice to me, but the second time was CRUCIAL and for this, I cannot recommend this game period. Here is the clip if you care to view it: https://www.twitch.tv/sky_shadow/clip/DeafGoldenTitanHassaanChop-mt4SmoA-30d9eWVS [h1] CONCLUSION [/h1] I don't recommend this game. If you want to play this, then just be warned. You're better off playing Hollow Knight, Ori and the Blind Forest, Ori and the Will of the Wisps, etc. This is not worth your time and the final segments will cement that regretefulness. By the time you reach that point, the game will not be refundable. So take my words of warning. Just wait or get something else.

I had a rough start with this one but after a few hours really ended up loving it. The biggest hurdle was learning the controls for all the different movement options and getting to the point where I could string them all together comfortably. The biggest knock against Bo is probably that it's not super-long and the first third of the game might feel kinda fiddly while you learn the controls. Everything else this game does, it does extremely well. The art-style and graphics are beautiful and varied. The level-design is wonderful and challenging and you can tell a ton of thought and testing went into every mechanic. The controls actually work very well, there are just many movement mechanics and learning to recognize when to use which can take a bit. Definitely recommended but be wary that it may take a few hours to internalize the controls.

Bo: Path of the Teal Lotus is a game that looks great, sounds great, has some great ideas, and... isn't fun to play. I was quite impressed by B:PoTL at first. It's clear even before purchasing the game that it's absolutely gorgeous, which sets an immediate positive impression; this is backed up by similarly impressive music and sound, lending the game a great aesthetic advantage from minute zero. I also immediately loved B:PoTL's core design gimmick as well: pogoing. The game's platforming is built around the familiar pogo mechanic, where striking an enemy or environmental object grants you a bit of vertical distance, which can be leveraged for more airborne mobility. B:PoTL takes this mechanic a step further by fully embracing it—not only do you get vertical distance for your pogo, striking any enemy or object while airborne also grants you another jump entirely, with no limit to how many times you can chain these additional jumps. As long as you keep hitting things midair, you can stay midair indefinitely. This is a very interesting design choice, one I haven't seen anywhere else, and it opens up very interesting platforming before you even start gathering additional movement abilities. And the game actively encourages this with a special combo mechanic and platforming setpieces that are specifically designed to allow you to stay midair through their entirety. It's extremely satisfying to execute and is, in a vacuum, a very fun idea. "Hold on," I can hear you thinking. "You said the game isn't fun in your opening sentence, but you just described the core mechanic as fun. How does that make any sense?" Dear reader, I understand your confusion. Yes, the jumping mechanic in B:PoTL is fun. But that's about the only fun thing about it, because the rest of my experience is an extensive laundry list of annoyance. Shall we get started? Platforming is the core experience of B:PoTL, but the game relies on an extremely tedious design choice to build a lot of the platforming segments: moving objects. Now, I know moving platforming objects are nothing new, and they're present in pretty much any 2D sidescroller. They're fine in moderation, because moving platforms, grab points, et. al. open up a lot of design space when creating environments to navigate. The problem is that moving objects are UBITUITIOUS during platforming in B:PoTL, and you begin to spend a lot of your playtime simply waiting for the objects to get into the position you need them to be in so you can attempt the platforming sequence. And the challenge in this game comes entirely from platforming, which means you'll likely be retrying those platforming sequences a lot, which means you're going to be waiting... a lot. It's not overwhelming at first, but, after a few hours of play, it gets increasingly aggravating just standing and waiting for objects to move into place so you can simply TRY to advance forward. It's death by a thousand cuts, a thousand small moments of interrupted play that slowly compound into tedium. Remember all those times Celeste made you wait before retrying a room? No, you don't, because you never had to. Speaking of tedium, do you like fetch quests? Of course you don't, because they're horrible. Care to guess what type of quest appears in—and I'm not kidding—EVERY SINGLE ZONE of B:PoTL? Yep, fetch quests! I really shouldn't have to explain why retrieving four nearby MacGuffins and bringing them back to an arbitrary point is boring, but I guess I will. Metroidvanias live and die upon their exploration, and, typically, are at their most fun when the player is caught in a stream of exploratory momentum, pushing forward into the unknown and stumbling onto new secrets. The constant fetch quests in B:PoTL cause this momentum to grind to a halt, forcing you to backtrack across the same zone you just worked through to find 3-4 completely immaterial objects just so you can keep playing the game. It completely arrests the sense of exploration, since you're forced to stay in one clustered area to find objects that don't have any mechanical function in the game. If it were only once or twice, I could forgive it. If it were optional, I could forgive it. But, again, there has been a fetch quest in EVERY ZONE, and it's so boring that I'm starting to keep my eye out for wet paint I can watch dry. I'd like to keep progressing through the game, but I can't—I have to run errands for another NPC. Another thing Metroidvanias thrive on is interconnectivity. There's little more satisfying than pushing deep into a biome, breaking through a literal or figurative obstacle, and then realizing you've curled right back into another zone in the game you've explored early. This dynamic lends to little "aha!" moments as you make sense of where you are in the world and adds to progression, as your exploration rewards you with an increasingly convenient world to navigate. B:PoTL has few, if any, of these moments. The game is clearly on the smaller side, which isn't an issue; I've played small Metroidvanias with clever maps. The issue is that B:PoTL's map is not clever; nearly every zone is just a 'spoke' spanning out from the central hub city. This means that there's little of the interconnectedness that defines a great Metroidvania map, robbing you of those satisfying "aha!" moments. It also means that the critical path is artificially bloated. Guess where you must head next after going all the way to the right? Yup, that's correct, all the way to the left! Nothing says "fun" like backtracking the entire distance of the game world's distance in one go—and buckle up, because you'll be doing this several times. The meta-planning of the critical path is consistently terrible in this way, as you'll just keep zig-zagging between disconnected points on opposite sides of the map. All of the gripes I've listed above are enough to render the game unfun for me—these are core problems that irredeemably dampen the experience. I could go into some of the smaller complaints, like the spongey boss fights, annoying baseball bat mechanic, and horrible grapple detection. But I won't linger on those, because the camel's back is already broken, and these complaints are yet more straw on the poor beast's ailing spine. I really wish this game were better than it is. There absolutely are high points in this game, like the bridge chase sequence toward the beginning, which was pure exhilaration. The problem is that sequence was, like, 3 minutes long, which is a tiny slice of the game's overall runtime, and then we're right back to the slog. I really, really tried to finish B:PoTL, but loading up the game was, invariably, a descent into frustration. I ultimately had to throw in the towel because there are very few moments of actual fun to be had in the game—the majority of the experience is defined by annoyance. There are bright spots to the game, mostly in its presentation and dialogue, but the actual design is very poorly executed from macro to micro. I'd like to see these developers try their hand at a sequel, because I think they have the potential to make a good game. However, Bo: Path of the Teal Lotus is not that game, and I'd recommend you avoid it.