Reminisce about childhood imagination in Where The Bees Make Honey
Childhood dreams
I don’t think I’ve ever played as a frustrated telemarketer in a video game before, but that’s Sunny, the protagonist of Where The Bees Make Honey, a narrative puzzle game that released earlier this week. It’s not a game about making cold calls, though, but instead about reminiscing on the freedoms of childhood. Here’s a trailer showing off some of those moments of reflection, all made hazy by what I assume is the visual representation of nostalgia.
According to the game’s Steam page, the game combines first-person exploration of Sunny’s workplace with the puzzle-box like vignettes. In combination, they build a story of a woman who is obviously fed up with her job and wanting to return to a time “where playing dress up was larger than life and changed the environments around you.” How exactly the bee and honeycomb motifs figure into the whole thing is unclear, but I suppose that’s a case of playing to find out.
Different vignettes will have different mechanics, including varying “from arcade styled vehicle gameplay to stealthy interactions.” That seems a lot of different things to fit into one package, but if they’re all packed up into their own short sections, it could work.
The brightly coloured personal reflection dioramas are reminiscent of The Gardens Between, another game about childhood and circling a stage based on the wild imaginings of childhood that I liked a lot. It’s a genre with a lot of potential for exploration and I’ll be happy if we continue to see more of it.
Where The Bees Make Honey is available now on Steam for £7.19/$9.99/€8.19.