The worst scenario you can encounter as a gamer is that gamebreaking bug. The bug that forces you to lose hours upon hours of progress, or perhaps that doesn’t let you complete the game you are playing at all. It’s a rare scenario, but any grizzled vet will have at least one horror story.
When this situation happens, a decision must be made. Do you restart the game and hope that resolves it? Do you wait and hope for a patch down the road?
I just encountered this with Bo: Path of the Teal Lotus. After getting about 75% through the game, I encountered a bug that hard crashed the game at a boss every single time. After emailing with the developer, they told me that they are aware of the glitch and are going to have it fixed in their next patch coming soon. This is a game by a very small team that has had to deal with hell since their publisher restructured right as the game was releasing. This greatly affected their marketing, and from what I understand, it also makes things like pushing out patches very difficult.
I considered waiting to write this review until the patch was done, but unfortunately, the next 3 months are absolutely loaded with games I want to play. Teal Lotus was released in the perfect window in mid-July to catch my attention. If I try and pick this game back up in December after months off from playing it, I’m sure it would be very tough sledding.
It’s a shame because Teal Lotus is an absolute blast in so many ways. But there are a few nuisances that make it where I’m kind of relieved to put it down as well.
Nuance Forces Me to Say This Isn’t EXACTLY like Okami + Hollow Knight
It’s easy to look at Teal Lotus and think “oh, this is basically Hollow Knight mixed with Okami”. There is certainly truth to that. This is a difficult indie Metroidvania game with a striking art style reminiscent of Okami, but Teal Lotus carves its own path in certain ways.
Most notably, this game is almost completely designed around a pogo mechanic. Essentially, every time you hit an enemy or certain items in the environment, your jump regenerates. So, in the right situations, you can spend several minutes without ever touching the ground. While Hollow Knight has this mechanic, too, it is used to an extreme here. In almost every situation in this game, if you are on the ground, you are going to die. Being in the air is about the only way to survive in Teal Lotus.
This mechanic is consistently used to perfection when it comes to the platforming. Teal Lotus has some of the most intense platforming sequences that I’ve played this year, with several that are right up there with the fantastic Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. The game does a great job of slowly rolling out new abilities that are mostly basic but play in well with this core pogo mechanic. By the point in the game where I stopped, I was using a fantastic mix of air dashes, glides, and ground pounds to navigate one treacherous sequence after another. I love difficult platforming, and they hit it out of the park with what they put together here. While it is challenging, it’s so well made that you can’t help but try again every time you fail until you finally get the job done.
That pogo mechanic is also used well in combat. Many of the enemies and boss fights in the game are once again designed around staying in mid-air, where you can be much more mobile and avoid attacks. The game also has a baseball bat type counter move where if you time it right, everything slows down, and you can aim and hit certain attacks back at enemies. This move is so much fun to use. As much fun as staying in the air and using that move can be, I did wish the combat was a little less barebones at times. Outside of that counter move, you mostly just have a basic attack in Teal Lotus. The game does have “daruma” abilities that function as the special attacks, but I had a few issues with using those.
First off, the game does not have health bars for any of its enemies (more on this in a bit). Even basic enemies can take several attacks to take down, so I just genuinely couldn’t tell sometimes how effective my daruma skills were. Even if this alone where the case, I’d still use them, but the “tea” resource that gets used up by using these special abilities is the same thing you also use to heal when you get lower on health. So, by using these special abilities that didn’t seem overly effective anyway, I would also make it so I had fewer chances to heal myself. Because of all this, I almost exclusively stuck to basic attacks, which was a bit disappointing.
The lack of health bars becomes a much bigger problem when it comes to the boss fights. Boss fights take a very long time in Teal Lotus. Some of the last bosses I fought before ending my time with the game took well over ten minutes to beat. That is an excruciatingly long time to fight a boss while having no idea how close you are to beating it. I actually think the boss fights in the game are pretty well designed overall. There are fun and unique elements to almost all of them, and it’s enjoyable to get a read on enemy attack patterns and find attack openings. But they are just too damn long for what they are. I dreaded dying because starting over from the beginning of these fights can be absolutely brutal.
Several times, I felt like I mostly had a good grasp on a fight but had one bad sequence after six perfect minutes, and it was all over. Once again, this becomes a little less frustrating if I at least know how close I was to the end, but when you have no idea, it becomes a bit maddening. This especially sucks because I did enjoy these fights for the most part. But the length and lack of information made it where I wasn’t totally sad to stop playing this game because I was kind of dreading how long the last few bosses might end up being.
It Sure Seems Scary To Be an Indie Developer
When you aren’t in the middle of the platforming sequences or combat, you are generally doing basic Metroidvania exploration and navigation. I didn’t think this was particularly in depth, but it checks the boxes in a satisfying enough way. There are several very helpful upgrades to be found if you put the work in exploring each area. Teal Lotus also features occasional navigation puzzles that I thought were pretty solid. Honestly, Teal Lotus feels like it could have functioned just fine as a linear platformer/action game instead of as a Metroidvania, but none of the Metroidvania elements are annoying or get in the way, so they end up being an element of the game that I mostly felt neutral on. They didn’t enhance or dampen my experience.
One thing that does enhance the exploring is just how pretty this game is to look at. This is definitely one of my favorite art styles of the year. The Hollow Knight + Okami comparisons are extremely apt here, and the game just has a lot of cute little artistic touches throughout. The music fits everything very well, too. There isn’t much going on with the story, but the writing can be cute and quirky at times as well.
All this adds up to an experience that I was oddly sad but relieved to put down. Teal Lotus has a lot of excellent design. The core platforming is so good, and the combat has a lot of ingredients to be great as well. But there are just a few too many design decisions that made me dread the bad stuff for as much as I enjoyed the highs this game can reach. I think with a few tweaks, this could have been something really special. Instead, I view it as a good game that hardcore Metroidvania fans should definitely sink their teeth into. The bug that stopped my progress should be fixed soon enough, and hopefully, some other tweaks come along down the road as well. Squid Shock Games was put into a terrible situation when this game released, and despite my complaints, I hope they are able to do more down the road under better circumstances.
Score: 7.5/10
Big Nerd Gaming 
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