A Cute and Cozy Collectathon With a Surprisingly Involved Card Game
If you’ve ever spotted a woodlouse in your garden and thought “I wish I could catch and then battle with you, like I was in a kind of indie, lo-fi version of Pokemon”, then Kabuto Park answers your wish. No bug or beetle is safe: you can catch ’em all and then battle, as if Ash Ketchum found a Caterpie and was so smitten that he didn’t bother to move on to a Pikachu.
Kabuto Park is lovingly presented as something like a scrapbook. The characters and bugs lift off the screen as if they’ve been cut from a kid’s book and stuck in with blu-tack. It’s almost impossible not to play it and feel cosy. It’s welcoming to all players, including kids if they fancy it.
Where Insects and Collecting Intersects
The gameplay is broken into two very distinct halves. The first half takes up the majority of your time in Kabuto Park, and that’s the bug-collecting. If you want to gather an invertebrate collection, then you’re going to need to catch them, and that means hopping into one of Kabuto Park’s four regions: Sunny Farm, Pine Forest, Crawler Swamp and Calm Lake. You start in Sunny Farm, but with the careful purchase of upgrades (specifically some wellies) you can progress to the others.
Net in hand, you can click on rustles in the grass to find an insect. But the insect isn’t going to give up without a fight: a bar appears above it, similar to the ones you find in golf games, and you have to time the pressing of the A button correctly if you want to catch it. There’s a green sweet-spot that will auto-catch the bug, and a blue area which lets you have a second bite at catching it (with increased or reduced chances, depending on the insect variety). Each insect has a different catchment bar – some small, some fast, some with tiny blue areas and tiny green areas – and purchasing Honey from the game’s shop allows you to slow it all down.
The Insect Reflex
If your finger skills are on point, you will catch the critter. We should note that they not only come in a variety of species, but a variety of rarities too. There are common, uncommon and rare insects, and shiny varieties of each. They also get caught at different levels (since the bugs can be leveled up) so it’s possible to find a ladybug who’s a proper chonker and is two or three levels above the others that you have found.
The completionist impulse starts to kick in. There are only so many bugs to find in each region, and Kabuto Park helpfully displays how many you’ve found before you go there. It’s very easy to get whipped up on this side of Kabuto Park. When you’re one rare beetle away from completion, you can grind away at a location holding a stack of honey, hoping deeply that the Atlas Beetle or other rarity turns up.
There is nothing particularly miraculous about this side of Kabuto Park. If it sounds simplistic on paper, it mostly is in game too. You don’t really do anything more than dink the A button at the right times and hope for the best. But there’s something simple and addictive in there too, as each bug can potentially mean a lot to you. It can complete your collection; it can be a high-level contender for your battle team (more on that in a mo); it can be a shiny; and it will always come with currency that nudges you towards upgrades like improved bug nets, bugipedia and magnifier.
Wrestling With a Fear of Bugs
The second half of Kabuto Park is the combat half. There’s something oddly perverse about this cozy, lovely game allowing you to pit your beetles against each other in a Fight Club. Kids come up to you, displaying their bugs and their levels, and it’s up to you whether you want to fight them. And you probably should at some point, as progress in the tournaments unlocks better shop stock, and therefore the better regions and insects.
The battles are a mix of Sumo Wrestling and card game, because of course they are. You have your choice of three insects and your opponent has three, and they take turns pushing each other with the aim of knocking the other side out of the ring. If neither you or your opponent played any cards, you would be watching a continuous tug-of-war with no winner. So you chuck in cards in real-time. Your energy replenishes on a timer, and you’re waiting until you have the energy to play a card and trigger it.
This half is surprisingly tactical. There are three layers of strategy: there’s loadout, where you’re deciding the best bugs for your battle team, as these bugs will come with a different deck. That’s no small task because there are dozens of bugs to pick from and they all synergise with each other in different ways. I liked to run with a Ladybug that generated extra energy per turn, which fed some of the big boys: the Atlas Beetle and the Goliath Beetle. These specialised in Knockback abilities and making Knockbacks cheaper.
Then there’s the cards you play, of course. Knowing what to play in what order is important: do you stack debuffs on an enemy, then attack? Or does that put you at risk of a quick defeat?
The final layer of strategy is when you play the cards, which is unique to Kabuto Park. Playing a knockback when an enemy is near the edge of the arena is an obvious strategy, but you might also want to time some buffs for the start of your critters’ ‘push’, rather than when your opponent is pushing yours.
Like Insects, Kabuto Park has a Short Lifespan
Deckbuilding min-maxers will love this aspect of Kabuto Park. If there’s a quibble, it’s that Kabuto Park doesn’t let you do too much with it. There’s a sequence of increasingly high-level opponents, but I found that I could bulldoze most of them with the same deck. It’s not hard, and there’s not much more than an endless number of opponents to fight. The upgrades ran out, and I didn’t find the motivation to keep battling.
But while I found the battling a little shallow (when it could easily have been a touch deeper), I was also happy that Kabuto Park wasn’t another twenty-hour RPG for me to grapple with. There’s really only two or three hours of game here, even if you play as a completionist. And that felt right: any longer, and the golf-swing bug-collecting would have got tiresome, and the battling would have needed more than just one-to-one battles. As it stands, Kabuto Park is a delightful little nugget, no bigger than most of its beetles.
Kabuto Park was only in our lives for a couple of hours and an evening of play, but that was intentional. It allows Kabuto Park to be quirky but not cloying, and fun to tinker with before boredom sets in. The upgrades come fast and furious, mostly because they don’t need to be stretched out to keep someone playing.
Not everyone will get a kick out of Kabuto Park. You have to be a fan of the cozy genre, and you need to be accepting of how frothy and inconsequential it is. But schedule a couple of hours and you might well enjoy a distilled Pokemon where all the catching and battling happens in a concentrated burst.
Important Links
Download from the Xbox Store, via Game Pass if you like – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/kabuto-park/9NM4WQ7TTH3J/0010
