A beekeeping sim about breeding and conserving bees
APICO is a laid-back top-down sim where you return to your family home in Port APICO, leave the city job behind, and pick up beekeeping again. You gather resources, run crafting and beekeeping minigames, and cross-breed different bees to discover over 45 new species. Along the way you find solitary bees and craft habitats for them, catch butterflies that each have their own special effects, and make and sell honey, Apicola, and other beekeeping products. Species you rediscover can be repopulated and released back into the wild.
The world is split across several biomes, each with its own bee species, so exploring is a big part of finding what you need. It combines resource gathering, biology, and minigame play with ideas drawn from both real-life and fantasy apiculture and floriculture, and there are forgotten secrets of the APICO islands to uncover while you work through it all. Progression comes from the crafting and beekeeping minigames themselves rather than from combat or timers.
Playing with friends
The game supports online co-op for up to 4 players, so a group can share one island run instead of each playing alone. Everyone gathers resources, keeps hives, breeds bees, and hunts for new species together, which splits the exploring and the breeding work across the group. Different players can focus on different islands or biomes, and product-making like honey and Apicola benefits from having several people tending hives at once. There is also a singleplayer mode if you prefer to run your own hive.
When you have finished the main game there is modding to keep going with, so a group that wants to keep playing can add content of its own.
Before you start
There is a free demo available. It lets you get a feel for the game and collect the first 15 species of bees, though earlier text describes it as the first 10. Demo saves cannot be carried over into the full game, so treat a demo playthrough as a preview rather than a run you will keep. Everything else is a calm, family-friendly sandbox with no combat, so expect resource gathering, breeding charts, and small minigames rather than pressure. Bees are central to the whole design, and a portion of the money the developers make goes to national and international bee, beekeeping, and wild bee conservation charities.