Developer: Exordium Games
Publisher: Modus Games
Platforms: PC, Android, iOS, PS4, Xbox One, Switch
Tested on: Switch
Bear With Me: The Complete Collection – Review
Have you ever been in a situation as a kid where you were unable to change your faith at that point in time? Something bad was going on, or maybe you were just lonely and had nobody else to talk to. Perhaps you felt like talking to an imaginary friend at that point, or to your pet rat that lived way too short for some reason. In Bear With Me: The Complete Collection, there are four mysterious chapters where the friend of your choice is a very lively teddybear. This collection includes three previously released episodes, plus a new prequel called ”The Lost Robots”.
Story
In Bear With Me, you will first find yourself playing as Flint and Ted E. Bear in the prologue, where it quickly becomes apparent that Ted is normally used to see Amber in the half-imagined world where everything takes place. Flint and Ted got their own problems, but there is something larger going on that quickly lets the two work together to solve a case involving missing robots. It’s a world full of imaginary characters such as sneaky fish with raincoats on and talking robots that have their own accents and behavior.
In the episodes after the prologue you will play with Amber and Ted instead, and even though the game comes across as something light and funny for the most part, the underlying story and thematics might actually be something to get you emotionally involved before you know it. Alright, the story might slip and slide on a few occasions, but overall it’s a very solid performance and even more importantly, clearly a piece of work that’s been made with love and passion. From the story that sometimes has a cool comic-style paned cutscene in-between to the sound and graphics, the game has something to tell.
Graphics
Bear With Me looks extremely polished for the game that it is. Sure, the talking animations are sometimes a little bit rough, and a small number of times the timing could have been just a little bit better, but like has been said before, the game radiates with love. The environments you land in are rich with detail and feel like they have a history hidden away. Something more than it tells you on the surface. The fact that almost everything in the game is put in grayscale, a film noir style if you want, just increases the admiration for how well the esthetics come alive. It’s a pretty thing to watch, involving you with curiosity for what’s around the next corner.
Sound
The absence of music in this game is one of the things that you might notice quite quickly, but it’s all set up to be an atmospheric experience at the same time. By not adding background music everywhere except for when i.e. a jukebox is playing on location or the wind is howling, the game doesn’t get annoying fast and only lets you hear what it carefully wants you to hear. The voices used for the game are pretty good as well, though they do often feel like the actors don’t have much experience voice acting yet. Especially at moments where you would expect a little bit more of a surprised or excited tone, the performance is lacking. It’s not a dealbreaker per se, but it can be breaking the immersive experience a bit when you pay too much attention to it.
Gameplay
Bear With Me: The Complete Collection is set up as one of the classic point-and-click games, like games such as Broken Sword or Machinarium turned out to be over the years as well. This instantly brings two sides to the game. At times, when the story is intense enough, it can be enough to just solve simple problems such as, let’s say, picking up a tire and placing it on a car. Some active puzzles (puzzles where you have to solve a specific issue at a single screen such as a jigsaw puzzle) are also contributing to letting your brain work by using proper deduction or common intelligence to solve issues that are laid before you without any explanation.
On the other side, the game can be overly simple every now and then as well. It’s fortunate that the environments you visit and the weird stories you follow bring you a lot of motivation to stay interested, but perhaps some more challenging solutions or just a bigger amount of active puzzles could have been a bit more exciting. Instead, you will sometimes find yourself simply searching everything that’s visible on the screen, to place object A at location A as it was clearly intended to be. It really doesn’t become annoying at any point, but it is a weaker side of the game nonetheless.
Still, the game has its affairs in order, and The Lost Robots prequel has a handy minimap as an example that is linked to a hotkey, conveniently allowing you to not walk back every screen you previously saw. It’s organized, it’s well designed, it has a lot of charming aspects and it’s definitely a great game if you want to try a point-and-click without really knowing what to expect from it. In a way, it’s perhaps just as magical and unexpected as games such as Freddi Fish and Pajama Sam were when you were still a kid, but Bear With Me found a way to bring this magic to a more adult audience somehow.
Conclusion
Bear With Me: The Complete Collection is a point-and-click adventure that knows how to hook you on a story and has many interesting sides for you to explore. The gameplay might be a bit easy at times, and the voice actors could use a bit more experience, but the game delivers with passion and love in such amounts that other games can take notes. With all three previously released chapters and the new prequel The Lost Robots, it’s surely worth your money.
Bear With Me: The Complete Collection - Review,
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