➤ Bear With Me: The Complete Collection, the review 🎮

A detective teddy bear, a girl looking for her brother and an old school point and click with extremely noir atmospheres converge in the review that you are about to read: if you believe that all these elements would not make any sense within a single video game, then you have never given a chance to Bear With Me. Or more likely, since it is an indie title never particularly highlighted by spotlight lights, you just missed it on the street. And it is a long road, the one that accompanied the publication of the various episodes of the series, which currently has a main narrative arc, the Bear With Me proper, and then a prequel chapter in its own right. Why are we talking to you about all this? Of course because we have tried it thoroughly Bear With Me: The Complete Collection su PlayStation 4 (but the final package is also present on all other consoles and on PC).

Plot: detective teddy bear, murders and kidnappings

La Bear With Me: The Complete Collection contains the main adventure of Bear With Me, consisting of three interlinked episodes, and the prequel episode The Lost Robots. The choice of the best place to start is up to you: if you want to proceed chronologically you should start from The Lost Robots, if you prefer the ideal order designed by the developers then carefully choose Episode 1 from the main game menu. The latter, it must be said, is not particularly intuitive: it assumes that the buyer already knows everything about the series and its structure, all in all simple but put on the screen in a rather misleading way; on the left and vertically three episodes simply named Episode 1, Episode 2 and Episode 3 (with nice images, but not able to guide the newcomers), on the right Bear With Me The Lost Robots, with a larger image of the others and which risks attracting all the attention of the players. The newcomers then immediately look left and up to start the main adventure of Detective Ted D. Bear and his friend Amber, in search of their missing brother.

Bear With Me: The Complete Collection, the review

That of Exordium Games is, needless to say, not only the debut adventure of Ted and Amber, but also of the entire small development team, founded just in 2014. It is a old school point and click linear and pleasant, but above all with charisma to sell: in the approximately twelve hours required to complete the main adventure (excluding The Lost Robots, which must be calculated separately with about another five hours) the player follows the investigations of the girl in search of his missing brother Flint: this is an apparently only disturbing case, but which in reality is then linked to more ambitious plans of the local underworld of Paper City, an imaginary location in which the events told take place. Throughout the three episodes, the relationship between Amber and Ted is strengthened and modified, the characters slowly show their facets, and the player plunges into an extremely fascinating and dark fantasy world, but told in a way suitable for everyone, a sort of fairy tale. modern on genres.

The prequel chapter is on the same line and deals with almost the same themes, varying the main plot a bit and introducing new characters and environments, but still all in Paper City: this time Amber is pushed aside and Ted is forced to work with brother Flint. The developers, and this should be noted, have included extremely interesting themes relating to crime, the relationship between siblings and the world of adults, all duly veiled within the main dialogues. The attentive player, however, will be able to catch them quietly: therefore, keep your ears sharp and do not skip the texts on the screen (which by the way are in Spanish).

PlayStation 4 Trophies

Bear With Me: The Complete Collection arrives on PlayStation 4 with a rich list of Trophies, among which the Platinum Trophy stands out. Unlocking them all is relatively simple, as in most point-and-click console titles - usually just completing the main narrative. In this case, some optional dialogues will also be needed, obtainable only at certain moments of the adventure. If you always analyze everything, listen to everyone and explore every nook and cranny of the scenarios, however, you will take it home even by playing the title only once.

Gameplay: an old school point and click

Bear With Me: The Complete Collection includes two titles that belong to the same genre and share the exact same mechanics: old school point and click adventures, in which the player will find himself from time to time in different environments (all designed with two-dimensional technique) and must be able to continue in the main narrative by solving various problems and tasks along the way. Variety and creativity are basic elements of production and gameplay: the tasks to be performed are imaginative and in line with what one might expect from a story poised between the serious and the light-hearted. They range from the recovery of the victim's body parts (the various limbs of a robot) to the interruption of the show in a pub so that some of those present finally listen to us without being distracted by the artist on stage; there is no lack of more original and fun situations.

If the reassembly of an incriminating document as the pieces of a puzzle is a strategy seen and reviewed in many other point and click video games, the manipulation of an assembly line appears more inspired so that that damned package on the other side of the factory finally arrives. in our hands. The player controls a different duo of characters from time to time: Ted and Amber in the main adventure of the episode trilogy, Ted and Flint in the prequel episode; the many funny dialogues between the two protagonists remain constant, insisting on some clichés almost always able to snatch a smile from the spectators (the height of the plush detective, his dialogues modeled on those of the most famous detectives in history, stereotypes of various types, and so on). All this, we remember, is also accompanied by animated scenes and situations in which the tones of Bear With Me become more serious and melancholic, taking the production to other levels: unfortunately they are few, and they are not enough to balance some important shortcomings. For example, the budget of the video game itself, which is visually limited. The developers themselves allude to it with irony in some dialogues, as when Ted justifies the lack of an animation by saying that "apparently the budget was over".

However, we must consider that Bear With Me is fun, accessible to everyone and with a plot that may not be very original but that does its job, keeping the attention of the players awake until the end. Of course, not all the backdrops of the play areas are equally cared for, the characters move woody and very slowly, and the animations (in fact) do not shine; on the other hand the Artistic direction she is very inspired, and in terms of charisma the main and secondary characters do not miss anything. Once the main adventure is completed, you will still remember all the funny characters you met along the way, even several months after the end credits. The difficulty level it stays between the medium and low level, never really offering insurmountable or too demanding challenges. It is clearly a story designed to be carried out by everyone, without ever really hindering anyone. There conversion on PlayStation 4 it does not present any problems and also the uploads between the various scenarios are very fast: the developers could still have adapted the commands in a more intelligent way (especially in the selection of objects from the inventory) and above all add a damn button for the character run, that float from one point to the other on the screen taking all the time in the world.

Comment

Tested version PlayStation 4 Digital Delivery Steam, PlayStation Store, Xbox Store, Nintendo eShop Price 14,99 € Resources4Gaming.com

7.5

Readers (1)

9.8

Your vote

Bear With Me: The Complete Collection is the right opportunity to recover both the first major title of Exordium Games and the prequel chapter at a modest price: both represent a pleasant addition to the story of point and click, especially to the one on consoles, where new arrived they are always welcome. The tones suspended between noir and a nice humor never vulgar could literally capture you, as well as the quick and interesting narration, which will lead you to hunt for criminals and cases to be solved in that of Paper City. Now, as adults, you can finally live the adventures you dreamed of when you were a child: a bit like Amber and Flint, accompanied by Ted.