The best videogame you'll never play
I love to learn about old and forgotten media. Stuff like classic / indie websites, weird game & internet lore and secrets, or in this case, a game lost to time.
Ever since I was young I’ve been very interested in indie games. Maybe it was fate, maybe it’s cause I missed that span of time where AAA game companies tried to push mobile publishing, but some-way somehow in 2018 I ended up purchasing a bundle of 2 specific indie games…
I also bought Causality that day, but that’s not relevant.
Bean’s Quest and Bean Dreams were hugely important games in my childhood. If it weren’t for Bean, I wouldn’t be the creature I am today.
That may be overdramatic, but these games still mean a lot to me.
While you may or may not have heard of these games, you’ve probably played something else by the developer, Kumobius, like Time Surfer or Duet.
The bean games were very simple platformer games where, instead of moving and jumping, the player constantly jumps (as is the natural state of a Mexican jumping bean). You tap left or right on the screen to move in that direction. This solves the constant overarching problem of mobile platformers not working well on mobile due to having too many on-screen controls or complexities, and I love it. (Bean Dreams trailer)
It was also one of my first introductions to axolotls! There is an axolotl hidden in every stage, who upon collection says “thanxolotle.” This is art.
Everything from the art, gameplay, and even the amazing soundtrack of Bean Dreams have stuck with me for years, which I was so shocked to discover that sometime after 2020 the games had completely vanished. Not only were they delisted off of a few platforms, but they had been completely wiped from every storefront, and even the developer’s website.
Side-note: according to the script I was writing in April 2021, I noticed the game’s disappearance a few months before then.
Around this time I was really inspired by YouTube investigation-type videos, like that of Nick Robinson or F4mi, so I thought that I would try to perform a bit of an investigation of my own.
A mediocre investigation
Wow thanks >:(
So, at that time I was basically a child. I knew very little about investigating, but I was extremely hyperfixated on these particularily bean-based video games which was the driving force for my investigation.
Kumobius is, or at least was a team of 3 people, all of which have actual jobs doing real human things like working for companies and doing taxes. Specifically the brothers Tom and James Greenaway, as well as Ivan Neeson. Because of this, by the time my faux-investigation started, none of them were very active on their social media accounts at all. All but Tom Greenaway who, while not particularily active, still posted more regularly than the rest.
I had my target.
I tried contacting him by email, Twitter comments, etc., but to no avail. Probably because at the time I wasn’t sure how to talk to people and still don’t really know, and ended up making my messages look a lot more intimidating and long-winded than they had to be.
I’m being very vulnerable sharing these posts, this is effectively a child trying to seem intelligent in front of the adults so don’t judge me :<
That didn’t work, but I did have one more idea. I noticed a group that Tom had at one point worked with called Set Snail… and their DMs just so happened to be open…
(twiddles fingers), Don’t mind if I do!
That was weird, I’m sorry.
I sent them a message of which I can’t view anymore because I don’t have X premium, effectively just asking if I could talk to Tom.
…
I explained myself to him and, while I did get a response, it didn’t give as much information as I was hoping. basically, neither Tom, nor the rest of the founders still did work as Kumobius, and so he simply didn’t have an answer.
This was disappointing as it was my one real “lead” in this investigation, but even then, it wasn’t the only thing I uncovered.
What else
Beyond just trying to contact Kumobius, I also spent a lot of time looking at the Bean’s Quest website through archive.org, and noticed they actually had a Humble Widget for Bean’s Quest. Now, I was expecting the Humble Store page to be completely down like all of the other store pages (Desura is a specific case as it turned from an indie games distribution platform to a cheap kids webgame site), but somehow the Humble Store page slipped right through the cracks. It’s missing a trailer, but the game can be purchased and played right from Humble.
You can NOT comprehend how excited I was when I saw this.
While Bean Dreams is objectively the better developed game, or as Kumobius put it, the take 2, Bean’s Quest is still really fun so I was at least glad to see that one was still around somewhere. (And you can get it HERE!). Bean’s quest was also their first game published as Kumobius, and is still very impressive for that alone.
Another micro-discovery I had was the game Calamari Kid, which was supposedly shown off as a Kumobius game at GDC 2018, instead was published by Sean O’Dowd. Haven’t looked too deep into it. Strange.
The future of Bean
Bean’s future isn’t crystal clear, shockingly there is enough of a community surrounding this game to have had a Reddit post just 6 months ago, despite the disappearance happening around late 2020. Someone else also reached out more recently, and actually got an email response from another Kumobius founder, Ivan, stating that a major reason for the removal of the games is the fact that they were built on an older version of their engine that they couldn’t justify the cost of maintaining, so they had to take them down. It’s a sad conclusion, but not unheard of.
He also mentions that at times he “[thinks] about seeing if he can fix them up and get them compiling and running again,” which I hope someday is the case as these games were not only a huge part of my childhood, but also a huge inspiration for me as a game developer in what I make now. One of my very first games was a demake of Bean’s Quest, featuring a horribly timed version of Fortune Fields from Bean Dreams.
I don’t know if there ever will be a time when we do see Bean again, but regardless,
to the whole Kumobius team for making this game.
Moral of the story? Lock your DMs so people like me can’t get in. And listen to the Bean Dreams OST.