Bo: Path of The Teal Lotus

The last five years have been really good for the metroidvania genre. There’s been a ton of genre entries that delivered massive innovation for what these games can be, or were just rock solid in general. I don’t think I’ve played a metroidvania that’s disappointed in my life. Well maybe aside from Salt and Sacrifice, but we shall not speak of the witch’s name. Last year alone we received Hollow Knight: Silksong and Ender Magnolia: Bloom In The Mist. Sequels to what I believe are two of the best entries among the metroidvania pantheon, and somehow they managed to expand on what were already masterpieces. There is an argument to be on whether they’re better or not, but you can’t deny their outstanding quality and love. Then you have Nine Sols, Blasphemous 2, Grime, 9 Years of Shadows, Ultros, , Vigil: The Longest Night, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, Possessor(s), the list goes on. I love metroidvania games! I can’t deny the fact the genre isn't for everyone, and in some way I’m biased for these kinds of games. However, it’s good to eat good. Who would deny a juicy tenderloin steak? Well personally I like fish more, but you get what I’m attempting to say. 2026 doesn’t really have a lot of games I’m looking forward to, so I thought about spending this year covering little known indie games I missed out on. 

Sitting upon today is Bo: Path of The Teal Lotus, a metroidvania that was released back in 2024 with its main appeal being its 2D animation and heavy eastern influence. Wait, isn’t there already another metroidvania with 2D animation and heavy eastern influence!? I mean we mentioned it a few sentences ago, so yes reader there is. Bo came out during a very interesting time. Nine Sols had just released roughly a month prior before Bo: Path of The Teal Lotus, and no one expected that game to blow up the way it did. Nine Sols proved you could craft an excellent combat loop in 2D format, and push its mechanics beyond its limit. All the while telling an emotional story about vengeance and self redemption. It’s become one of the high points of the genre, and even if you’re not a fan of parry focused combat or the eastern setting there’s something to still love. So Nine Sols turned out to be a massive success, and made further amazing due to how it came from the people who made Detention and Devotion. A developer well known for simplistic horror just made a god tier metroidvania. Everyone I know is busy talking about Nine Sols, and one month after its release Bo: Path of The Teal Lotus releases with little to no fanfare. There were people who played and reviewed the game, but not the outstanding success they hoped.

Path of The Teal Lotus began development all the way back in 2021. Christopher Stair was at the time a solo developer experimenting with the Unity engine. Over time more folks joined aboard for his project including the lead developers and producers of AM2R. The people who made the Metroid 2 remake back in 2016 until it was taken down by Nintendo for Samus Returns. You got two pretty big names aboard, and in 2022 you released a Kickstarter campaign. Managing to earn all the money to make your indie game a reality and bring it to all modern consoles at launch. All is going well for you and your game finally releases in 2024. It doesn’t have the massive praise or fanfare you wanted, but it’s reviewed well enough and Steam reviews are coming in positive. I believe Bo: Path of The Teal Lotus is a good game. I think the devs should be proud of what they have made, and it’s not often an indie game funded off of Kickstarter money ends up successful. Heck, it’s not often a Kickstarter funded project ends up ever happening even if it did meet all the fundraising goals. Bo is a good game, but I wouldn’t  say that it’s a great game. Some aspects are holding it back from reaching its truest potential, and I think one huge contributing factor as to why is because it was released one month after a game trying to do something similar.

Is it fair to compare two games that are trying to do their own separate things? No, I don’t think it’s far. It’s why a majority of reviews are spent seeing things as they are, and if comparisons are brought up it’s to games in the same series. My oldest works did this a lot, and it’s a practice I’ve come to heavily regret. My treatment towards Ori and The Will of The Wisps was cruel from how I constantly compared it to Hollow Knight. It’s my least favorite review I ever wrote, and since then I’ve grown and learned. I do not like comparing games with vast differences.  However, it’s hard not to when both came out at the same time and there’s enough similarities. Let's talk about Bo: Path of The Teal Lotus and what it does.

Story

The land is in chaos, well no not really. Monsters are roaming around as well as evil spirits, and the shogun who preserve them are struggling to maintain order. Balance has been lost, and so the heavens above decide to send down a spirit. A little fox born from a bud in a pond. You are Bo, a little fox critter who dawns a cloak made of the sprout you bloomed from. You navigate the red woods you were birthed in and slowly learn of a grand prophecy. One about a warrior every once in a while to strike balance back into place. It’s up to you to explore, make unlikely friends, grow in strength, and work towards fulfilling the destiny you’ve been assigned. If you are questioning why I’m unable to list anything else about the game, that's because I can’t really remember all that much about the story and world. None of it piqued my interest, and despite there being a ton of Japanese folklore influence the game fails to do anything truly interesting with it. I can’t find myself remembering key parts of the narrative in terms of writing. There’s fun gameplay bits, but the story is nothing really special. Which sucks seeing how so many interesting narratives have been crafted using this folklore and period in Japanese history. Literally last year Ghost of Yotei managed to create a handful of mysterious myths none of which are actual Japanese myths, but were intriguing due to how they were presented and what they ended up being about. I really want to discuss more on why the story didn’t work, but I’ll save this up for later.

Gameplay

If you’ve played a metroidvania before then you know what to expect of Bo. Explore a whole selection of areas each containing secrets, items, upgrades, and enemies to fight. At the start you are given just a staff. The staff is used to attack enemies and whack patterns, and later on you’ll unlock a dash, dive slam, glide, wall climb, and ability to launch back projectiles. Most of these kinds of games would give the player a double jump early, but Bo takes an interesting approach. Everytime you whack an enemy or lantern while in midair you gain an extra jump. It’s similar to the Cloudstep ability from The Messenger where the player could suspend themselves in the air for much longer. This design choice allows Path of The Teal Lotus to create a list of interesting platforming challenges. Combine this with the different character upgrades you earn throughout as well as level mechanics and you get a pretty fun metroidvania centered on platforming. Even the combat encounters force you to make good use of your abilities. Whether it be them being in the air for long stretches of time, or unable to be damaged unless you do a specific thing.

If you do manage to take damage during your travels you have the ability to heal. A kettle that’ll restore one health point as long as you have enough points stored into it. The points are gained from hitting enemies. A system very similar to Hollow Knight and its Soul mechanic, and just like that game you have to stand completely still while healing. Meaning you have to be careful whenever you pull the kettle out to recover. If you die you’re sent back to the last shrine you’ve rested at just like in Hollow Knight and Nine Sols. Throughout your journey you’ll pick up many collectibles outside of character upgrades. Charms you can equip to give Bo extra perks, or the many currencies of this game. These currencies can be spent at facilities in the big city to either upgrade Bo’s stats, gear, or purchase charms you can’t find just through exploration. Bringing the right toolkit may just be what’s needed to make difficult scenarios much easier. Outside of that there’s not much else I can say about Bo. The game is kinda what you expect from another entry in the metroidvania genre, and that can be alright depending on the type of player you are. Hopefully you can fulfill this sacred oath and bring about the harmony we all deserve.

Thoughts

I think Bo: Path of The Teal Lotus is a good game, but honestly I kind of expected more. What’s weird is that Bo isn’t particularly doing anything wrong or that annoys me. It’s a very well made game, runs for around eight to ten hours, and doesn’t contain any game breaking bugs or times where I’d want to quit. The game is fun and what more can you want? It’s a well paced journey that doesn’t overstay its welcome, and in an age where runtime is bloated for the sake of size it is refreshing to play games that respect your time. Yet, something about Bo felt off to me. Aspects of Bo while nowhere near terrible lacked what I love about so many other metroidvanias I have enjoyed so much in the past. First off this game has an amazing art style. The 2D animation and backgrounds are a joy to look at, and you can tell whoever was in charge of drawing this world had a ton of fun doing so. Every area is visually distinct, colorful, and pops out toward your eyes. I’ll always take colorful art direction over something that is depressing unless it is supposed to be depressing. Bo has a cohesive world to navigate through and I never felt confused on where I had to go next. A vast majority of areas are designed to be gone through once. There are a few times where paths branch, or you can’t access a new area due to lacking a character upgrade. It is easy to keep track of these things though, and backtracking through the world is easy. You even have a book to keep tabs on ongoing questlines.

The game has a condensed world that in terms of progression is quite linear. Which is great if the player is not a fan of traditional metroidvania problems, but at the same time I have these moments in the genre. I enjoy having a vast interconnected world versus one that’s condensed & linear. I enjoy scouring for every secret lying in it, and being rewarded for my curiosity. I enjoy finding new upgrades, but they don’t just act as a key to the next area but multiple routes I miss in prior hours. Finding secrets in Hollow Knight and Ender Lilies was fun because even if the reward was small or something you’d never used it was worthwhile. Whereas exploration in Bo just never was, because I never felt pushed to find these rewards. The game is balanced around the players’ basic toolkit. Sure you’ll have to upgrade health and attack damage, but that’s about it. Never did I feel pushed to engage with the charm system. Never did I feel like switching between the different Darumas you have at your disposal. Oh yeah, there’s these little orbs you can launch to do ranged damage and damage is increased if you maintain combos. Yet, the basic attacks are still good enough for most encounters. Heck, I think the first melee damage upgrade is the only one that matters because a good chunk of fights in Path of The Teal Lotus are easy.

A big difference between Nine Sols and Bo is that one’s combat is more focused around parrying and different kinds of counters. The other is more focused around platforming and utilizing your different abilities. Bo is the game for people who want a less combat focused game, and in a lot of ways it stands out a bit. There are long stretches of platforming challenges at times, and near the end is when the difficulty starts to ramp in terms of complexity of these challenges. Controls are tight, and even when it got going nothing felt frustrating or unfair. This game has a decent curve. There’s been a good handful of times I critiqued a game’s difficulty in the past, but I never said that difficulty led me to hating a game. Frustrated yes, but hating? Never, because difficulty is a huge part of video games. It’s a way of pushing and stacking mechanics. Having the player utilize everything you give them rather than introduce something and never use it again. Bo is a rare occasion where a game can properly use all of its mechanics, and still feel like it didn’t push them enough. Platforming challenges while constantly rising felt pretty simplistic for the most part. I think this is an aspect Nine Sols excelled at. Now I expect some people will clap back by saying Nine Sols doesn’t have all too much platforming. Have you played Nine Sols? That game has a very fair margin of platforming challenges that make you use the abilities you have. It took simple mechanics and pushed them to the brink, and I never felt like Bo did this exceedingly well with all it was doing. There are a handful of boss fights, and only three of them I’d say are great or challenging. With my favorite fight similar to The Mantis Lords or Lady Ethereal. Bosses are fun and well designed , but they didn’t feel accelerating.

Now earlier I mentioned that I can’t remember much of this game’s story. The game contains bits that are memorable mainly in terms of gameplay set pieces. The bridge chase with the siren lady, the fox marriage where you have to use the abilities you unlocked to clear a path, or one section near the end. The overall story though and what was happening is one I never felt engaged with. It’s a simple narrative, but lacks the intrigue a lot of metroidvania games have. Part of which is due to how uninteresting the main character is. The protagonist has this grand prophecy they got to embark on, but nothing I did up until the end felt particularly grand. It felt like I was running around doing chores as they could. Whether it be finding the missing husband to the marriage I’d just mentioned, finding a dude’s kids, or a particular item needed to do some dojo minigames. The world of Bo has all these interesting elements whether it be the myths, or the myths they try to represent and reference. I’m not the most intelligent when it comes to Japanese folklore and their tall tales but I’m sure Bo is the game absolutely made for these kinds of people. There are so many references to things I never knew about, and visually it looks really cool. Storywise the game just doesn’t do much interesting with any of it, which is disappointing to me.

The protagonist and main story failed to grasp me, and the ending felt even more underwhelming to me. It just happens. It doesn’t feel abrupt as there were things leading to it, but it happens. It is a video game ending, because this game needed to end. Nine Sols did an excellent job grasping me with its protagonist and story. Opening with the protag getting shot by a tall unknown figure, somehow healing all his wounds, and being found by a human boy. The intro follows our hero spending time with the boy and becoming essentially an older brother to him, but the intro also raises a lot of questions. Who is this person and why did they get shot? Who was the tall figure who shot him, and why did she do that? How did Yi, the protag, manage to survive such wounds and what were the black tendrils that restored him into his prime. Then you have the rest of this intro. Why are humans in these countries being sacrificed to a machine? Why is there a gigantic factory lying beneath the surface? Why does Yi understand this stuff, and does this relate to who he is as a person and his past? These questions are answered over time, but the reason the intro has so many in the first place is to build intrigue. You want your journey about a mysterious hero to be one that drives your player. You want to learn more about the characters and this world. I don’t think Path of The Teal Lotus has this. It has characters and a world, but none of it is memorable nor intriguing. They exist the same way the story does.

I am a huge gameplay person, and always enjoy talking about game design. I am also a narrative person and enjoy games that put a ton of effort into telling stories. Being art that remains talked about and memorable for several years to come. Path of The Teal Lotus as well designed as it is feels like a good example of why gameplay wasn’t enough to me. There needed to be more of the X factors for this to become an all time classic. Something that Nine Sols and many more have. Path of The Teal Lotus is a good game and I do kind of recommend checking it out eventually. The platforming is good despite not being pushed to its fullest potential, there’s nice art direction, and again if you are not one for vast interconnected metroidvanias that are easy to get lost in then this one is just for you. It is a simple straightforward metroidvania game that doesn’t waste your time & has incredibly simplistic mechanics. If you haven’t played a lot of genre highs then I can’t understand choosing it over the others. This is a good game that I wish I had loved more. In the end I am going to give Bo: Path of The Teal Lotus am 8/10 for being enjoyable enough.