Honey Pot is a new co-op VR game where you fight bears with bees, and it's certainly intriguing.
Overcooked and Plants vs. Zombies are from two completely different genres. One is a co-op cooking game, while the other is tower defense. As odd as it may sound, both titles actually inspired Brazil-based studio VRMonkey when they envisioned their next offering: Honey Pot.
Honey Pot combines tower defense mechanics with action-focused gameplay, where you and your friends control bees to defend the queen from waves of rampaging bears. It's a silly premise but mechanically, it works. I played a 20-minute demo at the Tokyo Game Show where VRMonkey had an exhibition booth. There, I met studio co-founder Pedro Kayatt and other team members. Using a Quest 3 headset, Kayatt walked me through this upcoming tower defense VR game, while also recounting how the studio conceptualized this mish-mash of ideas.
Kayatt informed me that Honey Pot's first inspiration was Overcooked. Specifically, it's the "mayhem and chaos that goes on when you try co-op in Overcooked." The team aims to capture the same frenetic pace while also combining this concept with how they envision a unique VR tower defense game, which is where the second key inspiration, Plants vs. Zombies, comes into play.
The start of the match involves placing towers quickly along the path that hostile units would pass through. Kayatt states they've designed around 14 towers — "fire towers, those that create patches of grass, those that shoot balloons to slow enemies down" — and an assortment of elements that can offer advantages or disadvantages. From there, the focus shifts to action-oriented gameplay where you take on the ursa advance as a bee.
Some of the enemies I faced in Honey Pot were smaller cubs, easily dispatched in a few hits. Others were larger brutes that can withstand more damage before they were eliminated. Thankfully, your bee has more tricks up their sleeve, er, foreleg. These include flying above your foes and sniping them from afar.
Kayatt notes that, while conceptualizing the character's movement, they discovered that it's better to turn flying into a normal means of traversal. VR movement should be immersive and with Honey Pot, you pose with your arms outstretched before doing a flapping motion. I did feel a bit silly and I even chuckled at the thought. However, when my character flew high up into the air, the action and animations were fluid and easy enough to understand.
While flying, I could also bring out my bow with one hand and then draw the bowstring with the other. This allowed me to levitate for prolonged periods, giving me a means of shooting the rampaging bears from above. I let loose one arrow after another, bringing down enemy units until the round ended.
As for why the bow was chosen as your primary weapon, it's because of how "it felt so good to continuously glide while aiming and shooting enemies." There certainly was synergy in terms of motion, animation, and gameplay mechanics, making this part of the game very enjoyable.
Kayatt adds that the team primarily designed Honey Pot with co-op in mind because they feel that it's always more fun to play games with friends. Going in solo, however, doesn't mean that AI bots will join you. Kayatt confirmed that the campaign is balanced depending on the number of players that are in the squad.
As a funny aside, I've been told that players can also pull the stinger from their character's rear end. This can be used as a devastating projectile, but doing so causes their character to die, too. This sometimes led to shenanigans when they were playtesting as everyone attempted to detach the stinger.
Honey Pot is certainly quite different from VRMonkey's previous releases, such as Galaxy Kart and Sky Climb, but the premise certainly has me intrigued. The studio is currently developing the Meta Quest 3 version before finalizing the builds for other VR headsets, and it's expected to launch during Q1 2025.
