Ce La BeeCe La Bee

No health bar, and nothing to kill

There is not a single damage number in Ce La Bee. No weapons, no enemies, no failure screen. You are a worker bee, and the only thing you can do is fly better.

A full bee is slow and clumsy

A loaded bee does not fly like an empty one, and the whole game comes out of that sentence.

Empty, her nose and her body are the same thing: you point and you go. Full, the nose still swings round quickly but the body takes three times as long to follow, so she turns in a skid, crossing the meadow sideways. The same stretch of valley takes more than twice as long to cross.

And since you always come home loaded, the hardest part of every trip is the last part.

The meadow runs dry where you drink

Nectar does not live in each flower. It lives in the PLACE. An invisible comb of fifteen metre cells covers the whole valley, and each one dries out as you work it and comes back slowly.

So the meadow on your doorstep does not last, and distant ground is worth more per cell. Going far is not an errand the game hands you: it is an investment you make, against the size of your crop, against Vigor, and against the trip home.

You see the way a bee sees

A bee cannot see red, but she sees ultraviolet, and real flowers paint nectar guides in ultraviolet that we never see: targets and landing strips, painted by the flower so the bee knows which one is worth the trip.

Press a key and the valley changes spectrum. Flowers that still hold something light up, and so does home, far away. It is not a HUD bolted onto a bee: it is the part of her senses we were leaving out.

The hive is the other half of the game

Between trips you go home to build, and the colony is not a shop menu: it is a comb of hexagonal nodes where every pair that touches is a real dependency.

Storage cells, brood cells, honey cells. Workers you assign. Larvae maturing. A queen who levels up and opens room. And two loops that bite their own tails: jelly raises the queen, who gives room, which gives honey cells, which give jelly; pollen fills the store, which makes room for workers, who go out for pollen.

The colony also EATS. The bigger it is, the more it spends, so a rung is not a ratchet, it is a commitment. And it cannot spiral, because a colony that falls short shrinks, and a smaller colony eats less.

Your hive grows where you can see it, stacking supers. You never have to open a screen to know how it is going.

Night falls, and the valley becomes somewhere else

The sun crosses the sky and the moon rises where it set. At night the light drops and turns cold, but it is never black: the flora lights itself, fireflies come out, and the grass glows where you brush it and fades behind you.

The soundscape moves with the hour too: trees and birds by day, crickets by night, and wind that rises with you as you climb.

A journal with forty four things to do

The colony asks for things, the valley hides places, and there are long hauls that will not be finished in one afternoon. Forty four in all, chained, and every one of them is a Steam achievement too.

And the bee improves, always trading the same thing

Six upgrade tracks, eight levels each: wings, crop, antennae, stamina, legs and evasion. None of them is damage, because there is nobody to deal it to. And the crop is the honest one: more capacity is more weight, so it raises your ceiling and worsens your worst case in the same purchase.

In short

• Third person flight, no combat and not a single damage number
  
• A four kilometre valley with places of its own: a garden, an orchard, a wet forest with its lake, and open meadow
  
• A meadow that runs dry by place and recovers, so distance is a decision
  
• Bee vision: the world in ultraviolet, with the flowers that still hold something lit up
  
• A colony with cells, brood, workers, a queen and swarming, that eats while you grow
  
• A day and night cycle with bioluminescent flora
  
• 44 chained goals, which are also the achievements
  
• Six upgrade tracks of eight levels, none of them combat