Bee Kind
Bee Kind casts you as a blue bunny who looks after a busy bee colony. Bees buzz between flowers and hives, but hungry grubs nibble toadstools and then hatch into Zombees that rob the bees and wreck their homes. Your tool for keeping the peace is a honey gun.
Jasper Renow-Clarke built Bee Kind for js13k 2022, when the theme was death. The tiles are edited from a free pixel set, and a gentle waltz plays in the background once you press a key.
How to play Bee Kind
After a short intro, each stage shows its name and how many bees the colony needs. Hint boxes appear during the first stage. Your gun is not in your paws at the start, so look for it on the map and walk over it.
Shooting breaks toadstools bit by bit, which leaves grubs with nothing to eat. Grubs need a few hits, and Zombees need more. If a Zombee reaches a hive, the hive loses half of the pollen stored inside, and new bees only hatch from hives that collect more than ten pollen.
A stage ends when no pests remain and the bee count has hit its goal, which climbs from five on the first stage to eleven on the seventh. Some switch tiles flip the view from side-on to top-down, where Up and Down let you walk freely. A small contest logo gives you around ten seconds of safety.
Controls
| Action | Keyboard | Mouse | Touch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Skip the intro | Any key | — | — |
| Walk | Left / Right arrows, A / D, or Z / X | — | — |
| Jump, or move up in top-down areas | Up arrow, W, or ; | — | — |
| Duck, or move down in top-down areas | Down arrow, S, or . | — | — |
| Fire honey | Space, Enter, or Shift | — | — |
| Turn off the music after this loop | M | — | — |
Tips
- Make finding the honey gun your first job on every stage, because you cannot clear a single pest without it.
- Clear toadstools near flowers early. Less grub food means fewer Zombees later, and the open ground gives new flowers a place to sprout.
- Deal with grubs while they are small. They fall in fewer shots than the Zombees they would turn into.
- Keep your distance from Zombees. A bump knocks the gun loose and leaves you slow and unable to jump, so walk back over the gun once you can.
- Hold onto the contest logo pickup until several Zombees are crowding a hive, then use the safe window to clear them out.
If you like Bee Kind, try these
Little PlatformerMore pixel running and shooting, except your bullets and grenades dig tunnels straight through the rock.
Unicorns Off My LawnPrefer gardening to blasting? A leprechaun harvests blooms and shoos wandering unicorns off the flower beds in this calmer pick.
Questions
Why won't Bee Kind let me finish the level?
The exit needs two things at once. No pests can be left anywhere on the map, and the hive population has to match the target that appeared when the stage began.
Why is my bunny moving so slowly?
You got hurt. Touching a pest makes the bunny crouch and crawl for a few seconds, and jumping is off until you recover.
Does Bee Kind work on a phone?
Not really. All of the moving, jumping and shooting is done with keys, and there are no on-screen buttons, so use a computer with a keyboard.
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