Bobo Bay (PC)
In between the high speed action platforming stages of Sonic Adventure 1 and 2, the player sometimes found themselves transported to a serene space known as the Chao Garden where they could raise cute fairy creatures called Chao. When I played those games long ago, I found I had very little interest in the Chao Garden, its slow-paced pet raising always feeling like it clashed with the main game’s format. You needed to collect things by repeating regular levels to raise the Chao effectively but they didn’t benefit the main adventure at all, but over time I heard more and more people who had warm nostalgic memories about the Chao Garden and wondered if I had missed out on something. Sega never returned to the Chao Garden format for later titles, but a spiritual successor from indie developer NewFutureKids called Bobo Bay looks to offer similar play but without the high speed action shifting the attention away to a different game type. I decided I’d let Bobo Bay show me if I could truly enjoy the pet management format of the Chao Garden, and after putting 64 hours in to the game, I can say that my opinion has certainly changed.
Bobo Bay sees you raising colorful cherubic creatures called Bobos, and while it’s not technically incorrect to call this a pet simulator, Bobos look a great deal like mouthless babies and some can even be found in town working at stores or even as a doctor. Bobos do come in a range of shapes and colors, the player gradually unlocking new species but also able to customize the little critters with items they buy or win. Hats, glasses, shoes, medals, and other outfit options allow the player to accessorize their Bobos and there are even ways to make them exhibit animal traits, your Bobos gradually personalized more and more to look like something uniquely yours. Similarly, the Bobos you raise will all have specific traits, some that are immediately apparent and others that manifest or shift as they grow. Most will have an advantageous trait, something that will help them grow faster or compete better in certain competitions, but they’ll also have humbling traits that can limit their potential. Some are simple like being a bit forgetful so their stat growth might revert just a tad bit or they might have specific issues with swimming or climbing, but others can be quite disruptive like always taking a bit of your money when you pick them up or experiencing mood swings that make them difficult to raise. For the most part, Bobos aren’t difficult to take care of, a little love and some food every now and then will keep them happy, but sometimes you will need to make judgment calls on whether a Bobo is worth keeping. Thankfully, it’s rather easy to find new ones, so even having to let one or two go won’t mean you’re missing out on growing your garden into a little Bobo preserve.
However, you might want to keep your pet collecting a bit in check, because while they are easy enough to keep content, having your Bobos be fit for competition is a different matter. Each day you can enter a few Trials, these competitions usually taking the form of a race or a one on one fight. The Brawls aren’t too intense, almost more like boxing with no one actually getting hurt, and the races are split primarily into foot races and swimming races, but there can be complications to make them more interest. A race might actually be more about a gigantic jump they’ll have to make or a series of walls to climb, and once you unlock Sagas, you have more permanent tournaments to compete in where clearing out every challenge will earn you big rewards like new facilities and Bobo species. Sagas are essentially the game’s main objectives, the player needing to put together a stable of little competitors who can clear out a range of contests that can get quite difficult and even a bit outlandish.
To better compete in Trials and Sagas, you’ll need to raise your Bobos right. Each day there is only so much you can do, the player not just limited to how many competitions they can enter, but Bobos can only grow so much. The stat-boosting food you feed them will help increase their abilities very gradually and most will get full after only two or three snacks, but even the amount of food you can get will be limited by the day’s events. The stores in town will only carry so much, and if your stable of Bobos is too large, you might not be able to adequately spread the love and help them grow into able competitors. While the default garden can hold a whopping 30 Bobos which helps if you are angling for the secondary quest of collecting all Bobo types, a stable of 7 or 8 feels manageable without stretching the resources too thin, and the game does give you a nice suggestion for a daily routine to help compartmentalize each step in raising your little competitors. The cell phone’s tutorial section can be a bit daunting at first with how much information it can provide beyond the daily routine, but it feels more like it’s meant to be referenced as you’re curious about something rather than absorbed all at once.
Bobos do age across the in-game days, a Bobo that isn’t adopted from the forest or elsewhere starting as a seed that grows into a baby and eventually reaching an age where they exhibit unique physical traits based on how you cultivated their stats. However, Bobos also go through little cycles of rebirth, the game having a ranking system that goes from E up to A and even beyond to S based on their potential as they go through the cycle again and again. A higher rank Bobo has a greater potential for stat growth so they can take on tougher challenges, and notably, during a Trial or Saga you have no actual control over your little contestant. They move how they desire and usually do the best they can unless they have specific quirks like premature celebrations, but you can influence them a bit. In a Brawl you can tell them to be more aggressive, defensive, or go for a balanced approach, but in other competition types you instead clap for them. Hyping up a Bobo this way gives them a temporary boost to all of their skills but comes at the cost of some of their stamina, a well timed round of applause sometimes able to give the edge needed to overcome the tough part of a competition. Specific toys and gifts can help Bobos gradually grow as well, but there are also elements purely there for appreciating how cute your pets can be. Bobo Bay lets you give them toys or train them to play instruments, and the Bobos do this just often enough around the garden that it’s precious to see but not so guaranteed it loses its impact.
One unfortunate element of raising Bobos though is the early days when they’re just starting out. Competing will earn your little companions potential points that increase how much they can grow their stats when they go through their evolution rebirth. When you begin though, a Bobo will basically have no hope of winning a competition, but they need to enter them and lose repeatedly as part of their growth. This is also the most consistent way to earn the game’s currency, cado. Even losing earns you some cado, but when all you have are infant Bobos at the game’s start, the early hours can be a touch rough as you’re sending literal babies out to crawl in races they have no hope of winning. This period of what almost feels like humiliation for your new pals can be quite disheartening… but then after a bit, the fortunes invert. You witness your beloved Bobo finally clear a race that it struggled with before, you win a Brawl by the skin of your teeth, and you remember each step of the path that took getting there. The snack selection to beef them up, the competitions where they built up their potential, the items you gave them to help them do a little better, it all pays off as your competitor starts getting more capable bit by bit. The high goals of the Sagas means you can’t just blast through once your Bobo starts doing well though, but you begin to achieve more and more little steps along the way that reward your investment. That little critter that once could barely move is now humiliating the competition themselves, or they’re just barely clawing their way through the tougher trials that feel like true triumphs since the process of reaching such heights was earned through your decisions and commitment. It’s almost like helping a child get into baseball; after they’ve learned the basics it still might take a while before they can even hit a pitch, but once they do start improving, all that training you provided helps them to grow into a competent athlete.
Beyond competitions, the other main activity of sorts in Bobo Bay is one you undertake yourself. Each day you can ride out on the water on a jet ski to explore some nearby lightly randomized islands. Islands can have treasures to find, this being a good source for free fruit for your Bobos and always at least having one island with a few guaranteed snacks on it so the trip is never pointless. These Excursions can have more useful items as well including things like the Mashers that lets you mix the traits of two Bobos together to make a new one, and while some items can radically change your little friends if used, the game makes sure to explain the ones that would have detrimental effects while still leaving a touch of mystery for others so you can have delightful surprises. The Excursions can have their own surprises in terms of special islands that can incorporate platforming challenges or even progress the game’s main story, although some of the intriguing monuments you need to approach to progress are just there to be gawked at rather than being interactive. The Excursions do lead to more shake-ups to your plans than the more reliable markets in town and provide less conditional resources so you won’t have to worry if your cado is running low but you have many mouths to feed.
The town is also worth visiting each day, partly because it plays into the game’s overall plot. Bobo Bay sees you play as a set character by the name of Parfait Biggs who shows up at Starling Isle looking to raise some Bobos. While the town you can drop by is very small and has few people, Parfait greets each of them with such an upbeat and cheery attitude that at first it can feel a bit inauthentic. While the game does aim for a cozy, relaxed, and gentle vibe to suit its cute and colorful look, Parfait’s excitable nature and rampant praise for even borderline strangers can seem almost vapid and there just to avoid there being any sort of friction when you interact with others. However, encountering the nervous baker Pepper helps a great deal, as Pepper doesn’t know what to make of Parfait’s unconditional positive attention and at first flinches back from it. Parfait shows a bit more of who she is as she tries to more meaningfully connect with Pepper and seeing Pepper gradually come out of her shell and develop her relationship with Parfait ends up making the baker’s appearance a nice highlight whenever she happens to be in town. While in town you might also start putting together that all the people in Bobo Bay are some form of undead. It’s a gentle representation of the idea, mostly off-color skin, little patches, and the most extreme it gets is old man Cob at the market being a full-on friendly skeleton, but this all connects to a strange part of the world’s history that doesn’t ever get directly explained to you. You’ll pick up on hints, every character in Bobo Bay aware of why they are that way but since it’s common knowledge they have no reason to come out and explain it. Little tidbits help tease the world’s past in their conversations, characters not blurting out unnatural exposition since there is no reason to explain something everyone experienced. It tantalizes you with a little underbelly to this rather sweet and friendly world, but it doesn’t ever go so far that you have to worry about horror seeping into your baby training simulator.
There are many more little things to love in Bobo Bay, such as holidays that let you see things like your Bobos trick-or-treating as well as the option to do things at night which opens new spaces in town, provides unique trials, and even makes specific Bobos appear you couldn’t find during the day. Despite the amount of things to do, a typical day of activities won’t take overly long, most Trials not even taking a minute and only the endgame gauntlets really even approaching two. You can even fast-forward once someone besides your pet has crossed the finish line, and other activities like Excursions and shopping in town are kept in check by the small selections that mean you don’t spend too much time puttering around or mulling over choices. A day in-game might not even take ten minutes to do everything worth doing. You can invest in public works to help grow the town or expand things like how many items you can bring back from Excursions or how many trials you can compete in per day, but it’s fairly easy to slip into a short loop of clearing day after day, making little plans for what you might do tomorrow and finding it hard to step away, especially since your Bobos won’t even need to be S rank to clear harder Sagas so you can start punching above your weight class and finding success even fairly early on with a C ranker. I did commit far more time to Bobo Bay than will likely be needed than most to see the end credits due to playing pre-release as some things were still being adjusted, but Bobo Bay might give most players around 40 hours if they want to clear all the Sagas while days spent making incremental growth can still provide value both in adorable moments with your personal Bobos or great successes in the competitions.
THE VERDICT: While its early hours where you’re training fledgling Bobos can be a little rough, Bobo Bay also taps into the immense satisfaction that comes from seeing the fruits of your efforts. It’s hard not to feel proud when a Bobo you’ve spent so much time raising succeeds in competitions more and more, and Starling Isle is a nice cozy host for your Bobo raising activities. Providing plenty of opportunities for cute interactions and a nice swift loop for going through your daily routine that means you aren’t often dwelling long on low points, Bobo Bay makes for an adorable and rewarding pet simulator that even touched the heart of someone who had no love for the Chao Garden gameplay that inspired it.
And so, I give Bobo Bay for PC…
A GOOD rating. While delaying satisfaction is a way to make it all the sweeter when you do achieve victory, the early stages of Bobo Bay do feel rather rough, as does raising any new Bobo from Rank E. The periods where you hit a developmental wall in helping your Bobos become competent in the fields you’re training them in can lead to stretches that do weigh down the experience a touch, something that can be hindered a bit by only certain trials being available each day so training can be slowed down if no suitable one is available. It’s the kind of barrier that may scare a new player away and it’s hard to fault them if it does, but it isn’t like it’s pure suffering in those early moments. You get that early excitement of discovering new Bobos and learning about Starling Isle, uncovering special islands while out on the jet ski, and before the appeal of uncovering the game world completely erodes, you’ll no doubt have started to see your Bobo training pay off. Excursions could probably do with a greater range of special finds to make them a more consistently exciting element, but Bobo Bay does have a lot of little tasks to do that keep you from feeling like you’re ever unproductive. You can invest in personalizing your Bobos a bit, help the town grow, figure out extra ways to boost your competitors, and engage with the occasional surprise, and even if there’s nothing special about an in-game day, it won’t take too long to do the important work and pop into your teapot home to sleep and get started on a new one.
Multiplayer feels like the next step to maybe take the game further, although there is already at least a system where you can send copies of your Bobos to others and even host exhibitions where your Bobos compete with each other purely for fun. Additional content in most areas would of course add some greater depth to the game and tweaking some things to avoid early slow stretches could help, but Bobo Bay greatest value comes from the connections you form with your little companions. If they were too easy to raise or too hard, it wouldn’t lead to the same emotional attachments or wonderful stories. You’d never have something like Bikkie, my first Bobo who had high potential for Climbing so I trained her in it, only for it to be revealed when she grew up she had a fear of heights. However, despite that, she still did wonderfully in Climbing competitions, and eventually she lost that fear entirely right before clearing the final hardest challenge of the climbing Saga. I’ll always remember my dopey bright-eyed bunny-eared Bobo Sparx who wasn’t doing too well in competitions until I gave her a sword she used to unfairly overcome the odds, and seeing my plant-based Bobo Mint go from being so spacey she spent more time looking at the sky than running in a race evolve into the fastest sprinter in my stable is the kind of story I can’t help but hold dear. I’ll remember the failed arc of Herc who just couldn’t find the strength needed to clear competitions so I had to let him go even though he almost broke my heart reaching up towards me with a wide-eyed stare… and yet I also kept the inept Floor Kid around purely because I just liked seeing him break dance. There is certainly a delicate balance at play to allow such stories and bonds to arise that certain tweaks could jeopardize, so while it may take some patience for things to start clicking into place, I can say while I still don’t know how I feel about Chao Garden, I do now have a soft spot in my heart for Bobo Bay.