Boss Beek-Beekeeping Simulator

Introduction

Boss Beek-Beekeeping Simulator casts players as a beekeeper managing hives, breeding bee genetics, and specialising a growing business around products like wax, pollen and honey. Developed and published solo by Ray Smith, it launched on Steam on 3 February 2022 at NZ$6.29. Nearly four years later, it has attracted just 7 total reviews — this review read every one of them.

A concept real beekeepers genuinely love

What makes this tiny sample worth reading in full, rather than dismissing as statistically meaningless, is who's writing it. Multiple reviewers explicitly identify themselves as real beekeepers, and their excitement for the underlying design is specific and detailed rather than vague enthusiasm. "It has a ton of great concepts, like setting up hives in different ways, experimenting with different bee genetics and specializing hives to produce different things like wax, pollen etc," reads one 11-hour review, going on to praise the ability to tamper with the plants bees feed on and hire staff skilled in catching swarms — real beekeeping practices reflected faithfully in the simulation's systems. Another writes plainly: "If you know anything about beekeeping you LOVE the idea of this game."

The problem every single review shares

Here's what makes this sample unusual: every one of the 7 reviews, without exception, cites the exact same specific failure as the reason they couldn't actually play the game as intended — there is no tutorial, and no in-game explanation of what any of the beekeeping terms, items, or systems actually do. "Really interested in the game as am a beginning bee keeper, but with out any type of tutorial or guide I just wasted $5," reads one. Another, even after 11 hours invested and clear enthusiasm for the concept: "It really has tons of things in it that real beekeepers mana[ge]" but still couldn't progress meaningfully without guesswork. A separate, more specific complaint appears independently in more than one review: the hiring function simply doesn't work, blocking a core part of the intended business loop. Several reviewers also report the game running glitchy and laggy, with button presses not always registering.

Checking whether any of this was ever fixed

Given how consistently every reviewer names the same missing tutorial as the dealbreaker, this review checked the developer's own public update history to see whether it had since been added. The record shows exactly one post, dated January 2022 and describing the start of beta testing — before the game's own February 2022 release. No patch, update, or tutorial addition has followed in the more than three years since. Every specific problem described above — the missing tutorial, the broken hiring function, the input lag — has had over three years to be addressed and, as far as the public record shows, never was. A live concurrent-player check for this review returned zero, and the game has no Steam achievements configured at all.

Verdict

Boss Beek-Beekeeping Simulator has a real, detailed simulation underneath its confusion, one that genuinely resonates with the small number of real beekeepers who've reviewed it. But this review's full read of every review the game has ever received turns up a single, universal complaint repeated without exception: there's no way to learn how to play it, and that's had over three years to change without any developer response at all. A sincere, sympathetic failure — but a failure a buyer today has no reason to expect will ever be fixed.