Bean & Nothingness

Bean and Nothingness is a stepping puzzle game in which the player solves puzzles with the help of creatures hatched from magical beans. With their magic wand, the player can spawn new creatures and then use those creatures’ unique behaviors to help reach the goal tile of each puzzle. Bean and Nothingness offers a vast number of deep and challenging puzzles that explore the nuances of its systems.

The puzzles of Bean and Nothingness take place on a grid, with the goal of each puzzle for the player character to reach a particular tile in the level. Each puzzle typically features some beans, which can be picked up and placed in any cell by the player character. The player character is also equipped with a wand which can cast a spell in any direction on the grid. When this spell encounters some beans, it will turn those beans into creatures according to recipes that are specific to that level. For example, in one level, two white beans might make a cloud creature, while in another, a white and blue bean might make the same creature.

The creatures, whether already present in the puzzle or created from beans, each have unique movement patterns and abilities. For example, the first creature introduced in the game, the Roller, is a small orange dinosaur-like creature that will roll towards the player if the player stands within line-of-sight and will continue moving until it collides with an obstacle. As Bean and Nothingness is a turn-based stepping game, the Roller only moves an additional step with each step the player character takes. As another example, the Bucket creature will pick up beans as it passes over them and drop them under certain conditions. These behaviors lead to intricate and complex interactions around which the puzzles are designed.

The puzzles of Bean and Nothingness require careful logical and spatial reasoning, and also require the player to discover how different creatures might interact in new and interesting ways. Additionally, the fact that beans can be created and destroyed and moved from one place to another adds an element of resource management and numerical reasoning.

This gameplay ties into the game’s narrative, in which the player character follows a friendly rabbit and stumbles upon an academic research facility, where they find all kinds of research notes about the Tradition of the Bean. However, the researchers are nowhere to be seen, and their story can only be gleaned through scattered notes throughout the facility. These notes often provide a humorous parody of academic literature and processes, but also provide some insight into the characters that once studied the beans before you.

Bean and Nothingness is a particularly challenging game with a large number of puzzles, but displays a difficulty rating for each puzzle to help the player understand what they’re getting themselves into. It also provides convenient features that help with complex puzzle solving, such as allowing the player to save intermediate states in a puzzle that can be returned to later, even after leaving the puzzle and coming back to it.

This description was written by Joseph Mansfield and edited by Oriane Tury.