Hive Time is an obscure gem that squeaked into the very end of last year. It’s a game where you be bees. Now it’s part of what will surely be forever called simply The Bundle, mentioned only in hushed, reverent tones. Over 1000 developers have donated their games to the Bundle For Racial Justice And Equality, and they can all be yours, to keep, DRM free, for as little as £4/$5. It’s raised close to $5,000,000 already. Still not sure? Well, Hive Time’s recent update also had the best trailer ever.
Brrr br brrr, brrr BRRR! Come on, I mean honestly. What does it take? There’s its store page too. The structure of it is, now that I think about it, not that dissimilar to most management games. Your basic resources like pollen and nectar are gathered automatically by your workers, who puff into existence at a steady rate from nurseries. You can affect that rate by changing the proportion of your population by caste. More nursery bees increase the rate of bee reproduction, but naturally that means you have fewer builder bees, soldier bees, or forager bees. You’ll want generic workers too, to turn pollen and nectar into wax, honey, and royal jelly, for expanding the hive and eventually creating a new queen bee. Throughout all this are random events and cute little flavour pop ups about your bees’ thoughts and mundane non-adventures throughout their litte bee day. There are difficulty options to switch off most events and even aspects of the game if you don’t like them (you can skip the research tree, for example). It’s not super challenging but there’s still no harm in making it even more relaxing than watching over your buzzy little hive already is. I can’t remember if I’ve already told you about the time my housemate’s girlfriend hoovered up a nest of bees and we hid into the living room, certain that they would gather in the bag to form some sort of gargantuan multi-bee. That’s probably not in the game though. Bees.
