Does Bō: Path of the Teal Lotus break through the threshold from game into art? Does it use its kawaii design paradigm to elevate its status or does this game simply copy what has come before it in a Japanese visual sensibility or is there something more meaningful going on?
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Bō: Path of the Teal Lotus
With 1,210 very positive reviews as at the time of this script, Bo: Path of the Teal Lotus is a much appreciated, if not beloved entry in the Metroidvania genre, by Squid Shock Studios, first released on Steam on July 17th, 2024.
If you know anything about this game, even cursorily, you’re know how egregiously gorgeous the visuals are, how wonderfully evocative the original music is integrated into the game’s environments and let’s just say it; is a brutally, punishing and at times, extremely aggravating experience. Colloquially, its known as “Hollow Knight, in Japan” and for good reason.
Narratively, the story is straightforward; and that is not a negative. There is a hero, a villain and a destiny to answer. I would argue more often than not, a linear experience is most satisfying when it is nicely book-ended without the modern tendency to continually expand and extend as we see in larger productions from AAA studios and Hollywood playbooks, where a sequel or a new season stretches out needlessly and seemingly forever until the subscriptions are canceled well past the expiration date of the original content.
Bo has a sense of quirky and sly humor used by characters such as To and Ri, insults from Bo’s superior Tentaihana and other NPC interactions to lean into the storytelling. The humor is, for the first act well balanced, and foil the grave events that unfold to the world’s denizens over time. [People are dying, Kim!]. The character-building gets off to a strong start, and this of course being just one player’s opinion, will leave you wanting more in terms of both conclusion and continuation – a lot more – by the end but not for reasons you might think.
I finished the main story line at a whopping 17 hours and 12 minutes with a completion rate of 66.5%. My latest plays bumped me up to around 78%, hunting secrets and completing side quests, building out Sakura City’s architecture and trying to find that last flower. I can attest my playtime is inflated because of the screenshots taken along the way and how I migrated between environs without fast traveling to do so, examining game design elements, the beautifully hand-drawn and hand-painted artwork, the textures and shader applications, appreciating the lovingly crafted animations, and of course art historical references. I want to acknowledge that playtime is considerable for an indie game with a small team; the average play time according to Video Game Insights sits at 8.1 hours.
Bo is hard; extremely hard – and this is its biggest flaw – in that it presents itself as a loving, over the top Kawai, aesthetically driven plushie world but savagely punishes you with grueling and unrelenting instant-death obstacles with perfect-timing-required-input-areal-flow sequences. Just like Hollow Knight was called “Dark Souls with Bugs” this game lives up to its irritating difficulty. One commentator gave a very fair and balanced review on Reddit saying,
“I want to make it clear that the game is excellent when it comes to the fundamentals: the gameplay is crisp and fluid, the art style is beyond gorgeous, and the music perfectly matches the mood...I personally found it be challenging, but rewarding up to the very last level in the game, where it became plain frustrating.”
Bo’s design recipe (extreme timing combined with instant-death), is demoralizing and doesn’t treat the reward curve vs. the punishment with any concern of equity. Its designed to challenge your patience and tire you. I found myself frequently questioning if my time was worth the continual restarts and it does take a certain personality to persevere. A pessimist might theorize that the over-the-top game loop difficulty, combined with bullet-hell boss battles was designed create teeth-grinding anxiety and boosted play times. Visually the game’s impact and podium position among other trendsetters like Team Cherry and Moon Studios however, cannot be denied and there is a clear homage to the difficulty of the former.
I found myself increasingly impatient with the mechanical design choices in the last two levels, towards the end of the main quest (specifically starting with the first Ice Cavern trial). At that point I had most of the abilities and upgraded weapons. Having the beetle wing’s and the grappling hook made me feel almost on par with the most mundane floor enemies.
I do realize I sound like an old gamer who is past his prime, whining, best left to play with other Millennials in the irradiated safe-spaces of Fallout’s wasteland or perched safely hidden from a bunch of armed goons atop a gargoyle in Gotham City, whatever your favorite Arkham flavor might be, secure with wonderful gadgets and toys on my hip. But there’s something more going on than a little bit of skinned knees here.
In my defense I grew up with games as they jumped from the arcade to the floppy disk to cartridges. Nintendo left the handhelds for the living room console and I was tortured as a 5 year old with 8-bit originals such as Karateka, Castlevania, Contra and as many of you will traumatically remember: Battletoads. Look on my Works ye Mighty, and despair!
At first glance, and somewhat nostalgically, I thought I had re-entered the Snake Pit when the Ice Caverns really got going. It wasn’t the first reminiscing; Sencho Bridge followed the Forest of the Crimson Bamboo, had a strong resemblance functionally to Volkmire's Inferno patterns as you fight Hashimime while fleeing the ocean waves.
Sencho Bridge is a triumph of visual design once you pass the warm-up platforming with the little boat. There are some terrible platform readability in that section (and in numerous other parts of the game where visuals pushed out pragmatic consideration) but once Hashimime reveals herself the scene a feast for the eyes.
Suddenly your transported to the Edo Period ukiyo-e and into Hokusai’s 35 Views of Mount Fuji: The Great Wave. Hashimime presents herself as an epic divine character and steals the scene. She lives up to her anti-Granmamare from Ponyo reputation and sinks back to the sea as fast she appears, once you survive. Squid Shock presents one of its best aesthetic achievements and clearly self realized as this chase scene featured heavily in the trailers and advertisements before the game’s release.
The later levels however, and unfortunately are intently designed to exhaust the player both physically in the hand and mentally, flirting inevitable rage quits and get under the skin if you let them. For those with older eyes, using tired hands of middle age, the last third of the game becomes problematic. The complete lack of consideration of player accessibility, as the target audience are those who enjoy sadist games. Players with physical adversity, such as the worn carpel-tunnel of the office worker or the aged knuckles of the arthritic, have likely already asked for refunds.
This is not the dialogue I expected to have with Bo. When the Kickstarter was announced I was telling all my friends and family that we should all support the project. As an artist, occasionally and mildly weeabo, I wanted to live within the game space. I saved up my Kodama and building materials for The Architect when the day came we could all experience this beautiful vision and interact with its inspired folklore.
When critics in other arts claim that games need not apply, they don’t address this evocation. This is the power of games as an art form; to transport us to imaginary worlds beyond our own, beyond our human limitations, without our handicaps, beyond our immediate culture through space and time. This is the power art and history itself, giving us the super-ability to span both place and time where we can enjoy and delight in the contributions and experiences of the human family.
Mechanically, Bo is a masterpiece in controller design like its inspirations. You will be required to make split second button combinations to survive and that takes great precision to program. At times, I would hear my controller click only to see my little teal lotus get impaled on a thorn, an ice shard, knives or crushed by hulking three-eyed dog heads, over and over again. Just how small the timing between the audio emanating from my controller at the speed of sound versus just how fast I could react to the game’s flow state boggles the mind. I began to question if Bluetooth was partially to blame.
Later the Shogun’s elevator shafts in the Imperial Caste doubled down on needless, debilitating button input sequences with no alternative route pathing to progress the story. At one point I was guarded by multiple death traps with seemingly no way to break through or change the ray barriers because of a poorly placed spawn point.
Fortunately, the developers wisely chose to provide us mortal players with two huge settings that directly benefits the player who, like me, struggled: 1) infinite tea to use special attacks, and more importantly, 2) invincibility against enemies. Why this did not include negating or at least partially negating all the environmental death triggers is beyond me. Environmental hazards will still immediately and indiscriminately end your run the moment you touch them without mercy.
Metroidvanias use tropes just like any other game genre and as expected, Bo starts out meek, few abilities beyond moving, jumping and swinging the bo staff. Upgrades generally follow quest progress by successfully closing them out. Bo’s provides more than just a few side missions to pursue and they are closely integrated into obtaining power ups that you would sorely need if you played this game 1:1 (in other words, without the invincibility perk) but they are not required to actually finish the main story.
Finally, with my hands hurting after several days of grind, despite my fundamental invulnerability toggle, I reached the Shogun after passing through Asahi’s test. I don’t want to spoil the exact narrative context of the final interaction just prior the last fight, but will say the cut-and-paste reuse of the attack styles was by then, tired.
That particulate neither fit his tortured persona set by the plot, nor did it vibe within the artistic context of the world. For example, devices that were just represented moments earlier in the Shogun’s Imperial Castle as hulking, site-specific steam-punk machines, clearly inspired from Studio Ghibli’s Spritied Away Yubaba's bathhouse, are now transformed through Asahi’s necklace (a mystical key) into a ranged weapon. I could hardly believe this design choice to not only repeat three levels worth of jumping, dashing, grappling, sliding with cookie-cutter bullet hell boss challenges. I said to myself, “what were they thinking?” and genuinely missed the wonder I had felt in the game’s first half.
The confrontation build up with Asahi was clearly indicated through his dialog, his character commentaries, and the diaries within the castle. Its more than foreshadowed but felt rushed. Your basically outright told Bo would face him – but in what context was the real question.
Asahi was built up as the game’s keystone character, a-too cool-for-school, bad-ass. He’s the anti-hero who might both curse and save the Strange Garden universe. The game after all, begins him insulting you as the perennial hater. He has a massive statue in the city. He speaks to his acts of atrocities, his regrets being the hand of Shogun, alludes to suicide (or at least a form of it though life-sapping apathy) and how he unleashed monsters upon the world that result in, on and off-screen character deaths. Be prepared you will witness one of the most pointless, shock-value deaths imaginable. We’re talking Jurassic World-level senseless violence on what might be the cutest, non-threatening character in gaming history. You’ll reunite with some of these fallen characters later only to realize yes, they died.
Bo’s confrontation with Asahi has no sense of character agency; you are continually passive throughout the written story, during cut-scenes and you have no voice both literally and figuratively. You speak with the staff and who you best. At times villains perish and others will bend the knee to the teal lotus. This at times can feel hollow.
I thought about these interactions extensively as I wrote this review and one idea kept popping up in my mind. Bo is a metaphorical allegory like most enduring artwork.
We experience life linearly and temporarily. Life happens to us; we don’t direct it let alone control it. We believe we can influence and shape our immediate surroundings but the complexity of the universe is beyond our vision and most of the time, we live life reacting to our world. To put it another way, we think life should be a beautiful experience where all the colors stay inside the lines. But life isn’t that way. Our loved ones get hurt, they get sick randomly, get injuried in car crashes, mass shootings, and terrorist attacks that are in discriminate and have no personal connection to their victims. Criminals assault those who they see as weak, often children. People die, sometimes for no reasons at all, and war continues to plague our world without explanation from the divine.
We hope to grow into Stoicism as we age, but we only stubbornly move into wisdom at the expense of our of youthful vitality. We don’t have choice. Survive or don’t, but time waits for no one. You move or get moved.
I am by no means an expert in the originating Shinto and Sun Wukong folklore Bo is based and intertwined, so my angle here is someone trying to read into the archetype as deeply outside of the game play as I can. I might be making or more importantly, not making connections I should, to read the narrative properly. Bo is literaly a lotus flower which has held meaning from ancient Egypt to Buddhist beliefs of rebirth and nirvana. Why do we play games that punish us? Because they are mirrors of humanity’s experience in life filled mostly with adversity and challenge but sweetened with moments of joy and beauty. This is one of the main purposes of art. Art gives us reminders of those moments when things get rough, when loss and depression overwhelm our little hearts, when we cannot see how to move forward when a parent or even worse, when your child dies. Art helps us to fill, just a little, the God shaped hole in our souls. It connects us to our ancestors, our spirits both in the living world and beyond. Art gives us room to breath through Beauty, through child-like wonder when you still viewed the world with great anticipation, when sparkly things were everywhere and colors were never faded, worn or dull. This is, among other reasons, why art is so important and its also why Bo: Path of the Teal Lotus is important. Bo just isn’t a game, its a microcosm of our human experience.
I’ve only reached these thoughts after several days with time to forget the frustrating game play. The pain in my hand is almost back to normal. I will warn you now, that there are literally four back-to-back test fights through the last three levels with little beyond “your almost ready, kid.” That isn’t efficient use of code, its lazy storytelling. But that how life is. After every breaking wave there is another, and another and another. As Bo, you grow in power, defeat the Nine Tails, monsters of mountains and caverns, a towering golem, spirits and even a goddess – only to realize you have ascended not to your destiny but to realm of those who have come before you. At first I thought the repetition detracted from the experience; I was too heavily focused on actually playing the game, trying to survive. I had thought mechanics only served to reinforce the frustrating triggers of endless restarts for too little emotional reward. Now I think its journey too familiar, but a powerful and genuine one.
My original review of Bo was over ten pages long and after going back to the Strange Garden I noticed a few cookies post-story. The western ice-cavern now has up-welling wind for most of its height, something I didn’t remember. More fast travels appear across the world outside of the main list and a few secret tunnels allow you to reach them faster. You will still suffer through instant death traps and even the most mundane magical lantern can still still send you reeling off to a quick restart but the earlier frustration is lessened as you slow down and appreciate the little things as time grows short and like Bo, you prepare to move on towards whatever and where ever your beliefs take you.
ADDENDUM:
Hi there, its me again, but from the future. Sorry for the interruption but while working through post-production I discovered Gaijin Goombah’s rather excellent research into the mythological references in his Japanese Inspirations Breaks my BRAIN! - Culture Shock video!
One thing I really like about this video is that he goes through the first two hours of the game using original print references and contemporary interpretations from Chinese and Japanese mythology. Its worth a watch for more backstory on the individual spirits, demons, creatures and characters that you will observe. OK, lets get back to, uh...myself.
References:
“Bō: Path of the Teal Lotus – Steam Stats.” Video Game Insights, Sensor Tower, Inc., https://app.sensortower.com/vgi/game/b%C5%8D-path-of-the-teal-lotus
“Bo: Path of the Teal Lotus Complete Walkthrough.” Bonus Action, https://bonus-action.com/guides/bo-path-of-the-teal-lotus-complete-walkthrough/
“AMA I Am the Indie Dev Behind Bo: Path of the Teal Lotus.” Reddit, r/metroidvania; catsarch mirror, https://redlib.catsarch.com/r/metroidvania/comments/1ow8bdy/ama_i_am_the_indie_dev_behind_bo_path_of_the_teal/
"Bo's Japanese Inspirations Breaks my BRAIN! - Bo: Path of the Teal Lotus Culture Shock!" YouTube, 23 Aug. 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqqTAT0XsgY
