Both the protagonist and the antagonist of Squid Shock Studios’s Bō: Path of the Teal Lotus are born during the game’s opening sequence. The former, a diminutive fox spirit named Bō, blooms from a flower near a burning village. As Bō explores charred ruins nestled among bamboo thickets, a lightning storm materializes in the distance, its pink bolts suggesting the electrified limbs of a cherry blossom tree. When the vortex subsides, a skeletal colossus rises from the earth, stretching its shadowed bones toward the sky.
The giant’s presence punctuates Bō’s journey throughout this exceedingly charming, if mechanically imprecise, Metroidvania. As you skitter across a richly illustrated realm inspired by Japanese myth, the titan intermittently appears in the far background of the frame, ambling toward some indeterminate goal. Each trampling step the monster takes simultaneously makes the world grander and more intimate, as it looms over the sprawling landscape from leagues away, and as you offer aid to the people left trembling in its wake.
In contrast to the monster’s plodding stride, our vulpine hero runs and leaps with a pleasingly light touch. Bō’s physical grace is complemented by their earring, which morphs into an array of useful tools, including a grappling gun that lets you propel over obstacles and a beast-beating staff. That monkish weapon is also central to traversal thanks to Path of the Teal Lotus’s core gimmick: When in the air, hitting objects and enemies resets your jump and dash, allowing you to clear vast expanses without touching the ground. At the same time, repeatedly attacking foes while in flight empowers your daruma—collectible dolls that fire off destructive magic—giving combat and platforming alike a distinctively anti-gravitational flair.
Bō’s quest is brimming with captivating locales, dynamic challenges, and delightfully drawn characters. In a radiant forest, you help reunite a kitsune bride and groom; to win the trust of tengu warriors, you undertake their perilous rite of passage in subterranean frozen caverns; and atop a windswept mountain, you compete with hulking beetles in their eccentric version of sumo wrestling. The game’s varied set pieces keep the adventure lively over the game’s relatively short playtime, as do its strikingly animated bosses, which run the gamut from melee duels to extended platforming courses reminiscent of Ori and the Blind Forest and its sequel.
Most of these climactic encounters demand thoughtful maneuvering but steer clear of agonizing difficulty. A particular highlight of Path of the Teal Lotus is a rare 2v1 fight (turned 3v1 brawl) that’s actually elevated by its unbalanced odds. But a handful of segments are artificially overtuned—an inflated hit-point pool here, a cheap deluge of cannon fodder there.
The chaos caused by the latter tactic shines a glaring light on the game’s most unfortunate flaw: its occasional lack of responsiveness and visual clarity. Certain moves, namely the grappling hook, feel finicky to execute: Sometimes when its indicator appears, you may find that nothing happens when you click the button to use it, necessitating dispiriting do-overs. Meanwhile, an assortment of occasional artistic choices—zoom-outs of the camera that render the already small Bō tiny, nearly monochromatic color palettes that blur hazards and safe spots together, and vague animations that provide insufficient feedback—can make intense clashes inscrutable.
But while the game at times demands a level of execution that its design doesn’t always facilitate, its frustrations are fleeting. They resemble the towering skeleton that stomps through its world—revealing themselves in bursts but largely sticking to the darkness, denting but not fully cracking the beauty, coziness, and wondrous sense of atmosphere that surround them.
This game was reviewed with code provided by fortyseven communications.
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