It has many moments of profundity and is held back by being far too roughly cut to have things like goals and stories to follow. The game has a habit of crashing, a poor differentiation between what you can interact with and can't, bad collision with interactable objects. Overall it's too frustrating to try and get through a lot of the meat of the game or even to just kind of relax and see where it takes you. Because you're always fighting with the controls. It's nostalgic, thoughtful, morbid, and has a lot of really interesting things to say, but my tolerance for going back to it after it crashes is low.

An impressionistic quilt of people and places past and present, remembered and rediscovered. Figments of our childhood plant seeds, emotions, attitudes and ideas, and when revisited in dreams are spoken through by us, projected onto so that we may nurture those seeds. A watercolor smearing of the individual self and the collective, how much of our memories are really us, but how much can they be anything else. When we move away from home, we begin viewing ourselves as distinct from our roots, having grown totally apart. Most people don’t, of course, we just feel like we do. No matter how far we run, we still remain there, both an NPC in someone’s else’s dreams and a wanderer ourselves. We represent something specific to people, we were, and continue to be, formative in some way to someone. Everyone exploring the same spaces alone, everyone simultaneously forming the composition together. When people I’ve met journey in our shared lives, I hope I’m warm. I hope I’m smiling.

Beeswing is a semi-broken gameplay-void experience - an experience that wrecked me, over and over and over again.

In between crashes, or moments where the dialogue boxes seemed to disagree with the rest of the game, Beeswing delivers a litany of beautiful moments, both visually, through the gorgeous water-colored art style, (an art-style that occasionally drastically changes,) and musically, through this wonderfully relaxing acoustic soundtrack. The writing too is brutally excellent, switching effortlessly from literal toilet humor to a calm discussion of death, and the plethora of grief that comes with it, eliciting nearly every emotion as you explore rural Scotland. The ending moments especially comprise of the kind of stuff that simply sticks with you, as the credits fittingly come when you're not quite ready for them.

It's hard to fully recommend this game, especially given the fact that it crashed on me ~6 times, and the only way to save is by fully quitting out, but, if you can fight some jankiness, there's some truly life-changing stuff in here. After all, just like a good tree, a good game has victims.

9/10
Game #25 of 2024, April 20th

“The song of the years, the melody of life. Everything else - is not you, all others are strangers. And you yourself, who are you? You don't know. You'll get to know it later, when you string the beads of memory. You'll be what is most endearing, most cruel and most eternal.”

- Sasha Sokolov, School for Fools

Um museu construído através de fragmentos de uma vida. Cada caixinha de texto, uma pedrada. Díficil encontrar mais emoção por metro quadrado do que aqui.

Ainda que extremamente pessoal, seus personagens e galerias representam uma universalidade presente no bizarro gerado a partir do real, quando vistos por imaginativos olhos infantis, criando pontes da Escócia até Minas Gerais, me fazendo sentir que também vivi, em partes, a vida que ele viveu. Sem falar uma palavra, apenas através da forma como se apresenta, também conecta a relação que um tem entre a nebulosa memória da infância e a sobriedade da realidade adulta.


Possui certo atrito um pouco desagradável devido aos bugs/crashes e controles um pouco frustrantes. Só tome o cuidado de salvar constantemente.