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Bō: Path of the Teal Lotus review
written 2025-02-08
Bō: Path of the Teal Lotus is a linearvania I played in 2025-02. It took me about 12 hours to complete almost everything in the game, and it ended as one of my favorite action platformers, just wish there was more content for it!
"Linearvania" definition
Combat
Combat is largely based on staying in the air. You can pogo enemies and many of their projectiles as well, and it refills your dash and your jump, in addition to the height you get from pogoing itself (so it's like it gives you 2 jumps). You can even pogo things from the side or from below, and it still refills your dash and jump, just gives you slightly less height.
The game rewards you for fighting in the air in a lot of ways: you attack much faster, and attacking fills a "heat" meter that makes your special attacks stronger and also makes your normal attacks even faster. Most bosses also have floating hitboxes, so you have to pogo your way up to them, but once you're on their face you can do damage really fast, if you can stay there for a few seconds.
There's also a deflect-like mechanic called the bat where you can deflect certain projectiles in directions you choose. It can be spammed and has no cost or anything, so it's kind of overpowered, but it doesn't harm the game too much because it only works on certain projectiles.
There's also a grappling mechanic which yanks you toward and through certain objects, used in both combat and platforming. I don't hate the idea of this mechanic but it seemed really buggy to me, like 1/5 times it just wouldn't show the prompt when I was close to a grapple point, or would show the prompt but not accept the button press.
It uses a shared resource (tea) for healing and special attacks, which you charge by normal attacks. I like this system because it rewards being aggressive and ensures that you can dig yourself out of a bad position without necessarily having to run back to a save point to refill your health. Although spending tea on healing is usually better than spending it on damage, healing requires a safe opportunity and you can store a limited amount of tea, so tea-costing attacks still have their use. I also think the cost of both is well balanced at 5 hits of tea for a heal, 3 hits for a special attack.
Contact damage is inconsistent. Some enemies have it, some don't, and I never figured out a pattern.
The camera is problematic. In a lot of rooms it's fixed until you move past a certain point, and sometimes this hides hazards right in front of you. And in many boss fights, it zooms out so far that it was hard for me to see my character. Making this worse, some of them take place against backgrounds that are the same color as your character. I often lost track of where I was.
I'm also annoyed that you can't see bosses' health. None of them felt unexpectedly long to me, but it's annoying, especially because there were some times I wasn't sure if the objects I was launching at the boss were actually doing damage.
Enemy design
Enemy design is pretty good. Most of them move in interesting ways or have projectiles, there aren't many of the super boring contact-damage-only enemies.
Most bosses are based on projectiles, minions, or both, which helps keep them dynamic. The final boss has a good variety of moves and phases with different arenas, many drawn from earlier bosses, which I think is cool.
In platforming challenges, checkpoints are sparser than they should be. Often getting hit sends you multiple rooms back. Also, some save points during long platforming sections are hidden, so you have to make sure you explore every room to find them.
Platforming challenges often require you to use the bat to move an object from one room to another, following it as it flies and knocking it around multiple corners in a row. Often the object resets to its starting position if you drop it or take too long. I never struggled too much with these sections, but I could see them being very frustrating to someone who did.
Difficulty
Overall I found it pretty easy. I rarely died in exploration, and even killed many bosses on my first try. The final one was pretty satisfying, though. The main thing I wish there was for this game is something like Godhome from Hollow Knight, a postgame challenge area with harder bosses, or the Colosseum of Fools, with harder fights against waves of normal enemies.
For people who find it too hard, there's a setting to slow down the game, which I think is an underrated and neat form of easy mode, since it lets you still experience the full depth of the game, and also since it helps with platforming as well as combat. There's also invincibility and infinite tea settings if you want something more blatant. Sadly, there's no hard mode.
Saving
The game is pretty lenient with death: it doesn't undo any accomplishments since last save or drop any of your money, and bosses always have save points right next to them. Also, small thing but I appreciate that resting at a save point doesn't have a long uninterruptable animation. You can quickly sit down for a health refill then get right back up.
Exploration
I found exploration pretty fun overall. There's a lot of hidden passages, but often you can actually see them on the map before you've explored them, so they're not really hidden in practice. There's one annoying quest where you have to collect 5 items, and you've likely already seen 2 or 3 of them when you get the quest, but couldn't pick them up before and can't remember where they were. I looked them up.
You never have to talk to NPCs multiple times in a row to get all their dialogue (unless you just turned in a quest), which is nice, though I'm so used to games where you do have to do that that I always checked anyway.
Progression
All new abilities of course come from the main story, upgrades to your health and damage are for sale but require some non-grindable items in addition to money. I was never meaningfully limited by money on my playthrough.
Equipment
It uses equippable upgrades like Hollow Knight and many metroidvanias, but this is the first game I've seen with this system where items don't have different costs; everything just costs 1 slot. I think this causes balance issues; there's a lot of items in the game with niche effects like "remove the time limit for aiming battable objects" and these never feel worth using when they have to compete with things like "be able to move slowly while healing".
Like most other games, it usually doesn't show quantity information about what its items do (like "increases damage", but not by how much); combined with enemies not having visible health, it's hard to even find that information by experimentation. It didn't bother me too much in this game because I wasn't limited by money, and most of the equipment I used was stuff focused on healing, which doesn't suffer from this problem as much.
Story
The story is decent. It's about a doomed attempt to achieve immortality and the destruction caused by it, and has a nice sort of redemption arc thrown in. The redemption is clumsy and questionable, but I still liked it. There's also a bunch of cute animal people, and the ones in the city have new dialogue after major story events. I like seeing those progress, though I'm disappointed that some of them don't get the conclusions I hoped for since you don't get to talk to them again at the end of the game. The only thing I really dislike about the story is the prophecy trope.