Bear With Me

I’ve often thought that there wasn’t enough episodic, hard-boiled, detective, noir, adventure games set in the imagination of a young girl’s mind. Then lo and behold, in strolls Bear With Me to fill that very niche. Bear With Me, created by ‘Exordium Games’ is this quirky, point-and-click, episodic adventure that sees Amber and her disgruntled teddy, Ted E. Bear, go on the hunt for her missing brother. The game is interesting and fun, it has a fantastic style about it and doesn’t take itself too seriously which is great, but it also doesn’t reach its full potential in a lot of ways and may lean too heavily on narrative and dialogue that aren’t always as engaging as they could be

Narrative
We should start off with the narrative of the game since it is such a driving force behind the games design and because I feel the need to justify my previous statement about it not reaching the level of engagement that I wanted it to. Look, don’t get me wrong, I actually enjoyed a lot of what Bear With Me had to offer in the narrative department. The problem is that when roughly 50% of your game is solely dedicated to a narrative, it has to be captivating because there aren’t other forces at play to dilute or distract from it.

A lot of these criticisms I have would go mostly unnoticed in another title but when such large swaths of time are occupied entirely by dialogue it becomes nearly impossible not to notice them. A good example would be the very beginning of the game; after being awoken, Amber begins a conversation with her waker that just feels like it goes on for far too long. From memory there were 3 or 4 separate lines within the dialogue that I assumed would be the last but then the old coot would just keep talking. Once that conversation was over you then had about 30 seconds of examining and collecting things around your room followed by a sizable monologue and then followed by yet another section of dialogue with a new character. I realise adventure games are going to have a lot of narrative but sometimes I just wanted Bear With Me to ditch a line or two, stop trying to squeeze in every genre reliant spoof they can and get on with the game!

Even the opening game page and accompanying musical score are well crafted and put you straight into the universe that the game is looking to occupy – and to that I give my kudos. The game also jumps into occasional scenes of horror that fit really well and managed to peak my interest, change up the pace of the game and help to tighten my engagement; even if those scenes were rare and fleeting.

Also worth mentioning is the way the game handles comedy. Full of puns, fourth wall breaks, referential humour and self-awareness – Bear With Me isn’t afraid to try and make the player laugh. As mentioned earlier, some jokes landed better for me than others but humour is subjective so I can’t give it too much grief for that. What I can absolutely praise the game for though is that it isn’t too afraid to hide some jokes and quirky dialogue options in areas that a player may never see. Certain optional lines within dialogue or dialogue expressed after examining a random, unimportant object ended up being some of the funniest things within the game. This is a really commendable way to handle things because it catches the player off guard and gives you more to look forward to in a second play-through.

There was nothing particularly challenging about the puzzles, although if you did happen to overlook a necessary item (which can be very easy to do) you may be in for a good ol’ game of hide and seek with an inanimate object that doesn’t even know it’s playing.