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Overall Comments
APICO is a game that starts out with a lot of promise, but ultimately falls short of its ambitious goals.
Gameplay Summary
Taking a hefty amount of inspiration from the Minecraft Forestry mod, APICO has you breeding bees, collecting butterflies, foraging flowers, fishing the seas, restoring the reefs, cleaning up the ocean floor, praying to the Hivemother, and using the landscape to further your industry. APICO has hours upon hours of content -- for the casual player, there are a hefty amount of bee species to strive for. For the completionist, each bee, butterfly, and fish have "golden" variants. For those interested in optimization, there are six genetic traits to play with (lifespan, productivity, fertility, stability, sleep behavior, and climate preference), as well as automation upgrades in mid-game play.
This huge amount of activity is why APICO is not able to attain the cozy, 'place-in-my-heart' vibe that it desires to cultivate. The game spreads itself very thin across several activities, and player enjoyment suffers for it.
Core Issues
This has been mentioned in other reviews, but it bears repeating: the bee-breeding gameplay loop is too tight for any sort of traditional 'cozy' experience. Bee lifespans can be very short, and even with longer lifespans, production is a time-consuming process. You start with hives, which you must then farm to create apiaries. You must insert a frame into the apiary, wait for the frame to be filled, uncap the frame, centrifuge the frame, and then return the frame back to the apiary. By this time, there are likely other things to do: another frame has filled, or the honey can be used for other products, or a hive needs your intervention, and so on. This is compounded by the fact that the bees cannot reproduce on their own -- even wild hives will stop producing and require you to re-breed the bees inside.
This gameplay loop is mildly addressed with the introduction of honeycore machines -- hoppers for items, ploppers for liquids -- but the variability in production and the non-specificity of the automated machines makes using them difficult. APICO uses a 5x5 AoE to distribute items and fluids to any available inputs. This makes configuring automated systems complicated, especially when considering a full bee-to-apicola setup. On top of the non-specificity of the automation, the frames used in apiaries have durability, and must be replenished either through manual means or through the use of industrial bees. However, the variability of bees makes this difficult in mid-game, and the setup I created would either overflow with frames or run dry of them, both of which defeated the purpose of automating the setup in the first place.
Outside of the main loop, there are a variety of things to do, but they all quickly settle into similar loops. Butterflies need to be caught, used, and repopulated; solitary bees need to be baited and repopulated; the ocean floor needs to be cleaned by using apiaries and underwater bees; and the storyline needs to be continued -- by discovering more bees. The only things that exit this loop are fishing and cosmetic activities like building and painting. Fishing is a rather short section of the game, and there isn't much progression to be had in building.
My final issue lies with the storyline, which is outlined in vague terms that are told through the letters you receive after repopulating certain bees (mainly solitary bees). An ecological disaster has happened on the mainland that has made agriculture difficult, and you have come to the archipelago to keep bees to help this. Your father abandoned the business for reasons I did not catch (though one character mentions "what they did to your father", which implies he may have been betrayed or ousted). The other characters are similar to you, attempting to restore nature to its previous state, each with their own specialties and personalities. However, despite their various dialogue options, all of their speech relates to game mechanics or praising you for doing so well. The main goddess of the islands, the Hivemother, begins to make herself more known as the game progresses, but she never actually speaks any words to you throughout the game. There's a lot of lore to draw from, so I was disappointed that the characters are not more readily embedded in it. The closest example I can think of would be Bobbee, who we once see praying to the Hivemother. I would have loved to see more cutscenes or environmental storytelling regarding the disaster, the faith for the Hivemother, or the characters' personal ties to restoration. A lot of what should be victorious moments (discovering all the bees, restoring all the butterflies) fall flat because your only reward ends up being "Thanks so much!" from a character who has little connection to you.
Reccomendations
-Adding more personality and lore involvement to the current characters would help with immersion
-Perhaps cutting or simplifying some of the aspects of beekeeping (Changing frame durability to efficiency, wild hives autobreed, etc)
-More precise automation (Specifying blocks to transport to/from or using IDs to specify a network for linked machines)
-Searchable beebox (typing species name instead of scrolling)
-Entity limits or density-dependent spawning (the number of bees, flowers, and objects caused a little lag in late game)
-More lore involvement with the world (Much of it feels empty, aside from the gates and shrines, and more explanation of the overall situation beyond the archipelago)
It's not an awful game by any means. I 100%'d it and enjoyed some aspects (like constructing my apicola machine, broken as it was), so clearly it has promise! But it needs some extra polish and trimming to be an overall more enjoyable experience.