When I checked out Bear With Me in 2017, I was immediately in love.

As a casual fan of point and click adventure titles, the hook that pulled me in was its beautifully designed noir setting, with the game’s even more stunning spirit encased in a child’s imagination. This meant when a prequel episode was to be released alongside the games port to consoles, I was so excited for more Ted E. Bear.

If you haven’t heard of it before, Bear With Me tells the story of Amber and her partner Ted E. Bear as they try to uncover where Ambers brother Flint has gone. The kicker is that the whole thing is done in a black and white, occasionally red, noir style. Ted E. Bear is a drunk, tired old PI character and Amber is the optimistic protagonist character, fulfilling all the classic tropes. Framed as a child playing with her soft toys, the whole game shows an ability to take a classic genre, not innovate on its gameplay, yet make a totally new experience that is a delight to play.

The prequel Bear With Me: The Lost Robots tells the story right before the events of Bear With Me, before Flint went missing with him and Ted E. Bear investigating, as the title suggests, the missing robots. This is all while dealing with the fact that Ted E. Bear is dealing with having been shot through the head. I won’t touch on the story any more as that’s the main reason to play, but it’s a super silly premise which is played out seriously in the world of the game. This balance of total seriousness within the silly premise is exactly what made the first game so damn engaging and is as present here continuing to be so damn good.

As with the main series, Bear With Me: The Lost Robots is absolutely gorgeous to look at. Its simplified cell shaded characters have the perfect balance of detail and simplicity to look gorgeous in black and white. Others in the world are designed so delicately to look like the real versions of these inanimate objects in a way my imagination could never have pulled off.

The biggest flaw is with the game’s point and click nature which is a combination of the flaws of the genre with the fantastic look of the game. Most of your gameplay involves clicking objects in the world in order to tell apart the interactive objects from the scenery. Because the game is beautifully designed it can be hard to tell the difference between the background and something to tap, so you wind up tapping mindlessly until something happens. This is a minor annoyance that is easily overcome thanks to the game’s story and design keeping you engaged enough to put up with it, but a flaw, nonetheless.

If you haven’t checked out the series yet then I would start with the three-part adventure in the base game Bear With Me, not in a small part because Amber is a much better character that Flint. But if you have played it however, and loved it the way I have, then The Lost Robots is the perfect companion piece to the game which I can’t recommend enough.

The post Bear With Me: The Lost Robots (Switch) Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

Triple-I video game publisher Modus Games has announced their partnership with Exordium Games to bring the Steam indie franchise, Bear With Me, to PlayStation® 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. The episodic game series, which mixes horror, puzzle, mystery and comedic elements, will arrive on console in 2019.

“Bringing the Bear With Me series to console feels like finding a rare gem and letting the whole world in on the secret,” said Christina Seelye, CEO of Modus Games. “Our team is very excited to get to work on this gritty and entertaining game.”

Bear With Me is a single-player experience centered around a young girl named Amber and her hard-boiled detective teddy bear as they attempt to solve the disappearance of Amber’s missing brother, Flint. Dark interrogations, sarcastic discussions, and hidden clues are all in store as the duo makes their way through a mysterious world of danger and corruption.

“Seeing the great success Bear With Me has had on Steam, we couldn’t be happier to bring the game to console players,” said Andrej Kovacevic, Game Director of Exordium Games. “Soon everyone will have the chance to meet these extraordinarily diverse characters!”

More information is still to come, stay tuned!

The post Bear with Me Coming to Console appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

Last Encounter, the intergalactic roguelike twin-stick shooter with extensive weapon customization from Exordium Games, will arrive on Windows via Steam in Q2 2018.

Set in the distant future, all hope is lost when our world is invaded by a savage and technologically superior alien race. To end the onslaught, humanity’s last remaining pilots will take the fight to the extraterrestrials’ vibrant, procedurally-generated galaxies.

With a fleet of unlockable and upgradable ships, each with their own abilities and attributes, mankind will have the spacecraft to battle the invaders, but will still need the firepower to eradicate their enemies. Fortunately each ship will have a component-based weapon system, allowing pilots to create their own armaments by customizing bullet type, firing pattern and more using parts discovered throughout their adventure.

Players will be able to bring up to three friends for cooperative annihilation. Together, they’ll take down challenging enemies and bosses in engaging, fast-paced couch co-op.

“Last Encounter offers a cooperative roguelike experience that encourages strategizing and working together, but players who want to tackle the challenge alone are not at a disadvantage,” said Andrej Kovacevic, Game Director, Exordium Games. “The component-based weapon system allows players to adapt their weapons and ships to maximize their chances for success in every situation, be it single or multiplayer.”

Last Encounter will also release on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One later in Q2. Last Encounter will make its North American debut at PAX South 2018 as part of PAX Rising.

The post Last Encounter Makes Contact with PC in 2018 appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

Bear With Me is a gorgeous narrative driven noir point and click adventure game. The game follows the adventures of a loveable and enthusiastic 10-year old girl, Amber, as she teams up with her teddy bear, Ted E. Bear, to unravel the mystery behind various mysterious happenings.

Okay, so the premise sounds childish and non-sensical, but you are going to have to bear with me on this one. If you look past this veil, which isn’t hard to do, you will find a very mature dark and gritty narrative that will take you on an emotional roller coaster. The strange and whacky premise makes the game quite charming.

The story takes place over three episodes. The basic premise is that Amber’s brother has gone missing, a mysterious figure referred to as Red is on the loose and causing havoc and a city being slowly destroyed one building or inhabitant at a time. The story constantly had me guessing what will happen right up to the final point of the game.

The quality of each episode varies considerably. The first episode is by far the weakest of the three. It does a decent job of establishing the plot and generally being a good launching platform for the next two episodes but isn’t particularly engaging. I feel this is largely owing to a lack of interesting secondary characters and a generally bland setting, Amber’s house, which is away from where all the action is happening.

If you can grin and bear it through this first episode, you will be rewarded. The second and third episodes fix the major issues of the first episode by taking you to the very captivating Paper City and introducing you to a host of interesting characters. This is also where the story really hits its stride.

The dialogue in the game is well written and often witty. It really makes interacting with everything, even the things which are obviously pointless, enjoyable. The voice acting is also superb, particularly for the two main stars of the game, Amber and Ted.

The visual style in the game is simply gorgeous. It uses a beautiful grayscale 2D images that are wonderfully detailed. The images you see from the game speak for themselves.

The gameplay does let down the game though. For this sort of point-and-click adventure game, puzzles should be both better and more common. I feel that progression should be both challenging and consequently rewarding. Typically, I found things far too easy and unrewarding. A few times the challenge fell outside of this basket and into the too difficult or unintuitive to the point where I just looked up a walkthrough.

Primarily, the gameplay involves looking for things you can physically interact with in the world then interacting with them. Sometimes it isn’t obvious what you can and cannot take or use. The distinction being whether the story either now or in the future will necessitate its use. If so, there will be a hand icon that appears when you click on it.

It is a shame that the gameplay doesn’t hold up because the game otherwise provides an excellent experience all round. The game takes about 10 hours to complete and, at least for the second and third episode, will likely have you hooked until the end.

The excellent narrative and premise of Bear With Me makes it a worthy addition to the point-and-click adventure genre. Except for the lacklustre gameplay, the game provides a uniquely enjoyable and engaging experience. It is one of those indie games which will likely go under the radar, ultimately deserving of more attention than it will get.

The post Bear With Me (PC) Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

It’s not uncommon for games to be created that lack something unique, but rather create a little hook that allows them to stand out and be their own wonderful creation.  Bear With Me does exactly this, but instead of a little hook, the game is given its own facelift in a way that is considerably better than I could have imagined.

Bear With Me, for the most part, is a generic point and click adventure game.  You click around rooms to pick up objects and interact with them as well as othercharacters.  It functions well but there isn’t anything new or unique to say to this.  It’s a well put together point and click adventure game.

The noir detective setting isn’t too new either. Detective games have taken advantage of the nature of point and click adventures for a long time and it’s a good fit. The noir setting has been slipping in and out of the genre over the last few years as well, using the classic black and white colour scheme with dashes of red for dramatic effect.

What makes Bear With Me special is its art style and setting.  The story is of Amber, a young girl who wakes from a dream to discover her brother has gone missing.  Informed of this by her giraffe soft toy, Millie, she enlists the help of Ted E. Bear, a grumpy old private detective whose office is based out of Amber’s closet.  Between the two of them they need to discover in Paper City what happened to Flint while a red hooded figure follows them.

The story is basically made up of old noir and detective tropes, but filtered through the lenses of a young girl’s imagination.  This angle makes the game both unique and charming as all heck.  The humour comes by way of some of the characters being firmly presented as older characters, like Ted being an old alcoholic, or Millie being an older, super nice woman.  These offer their own humour and the jokes are far from limited to this.  Other humour comes by way of banter between characters and Amber’s interpretation of the world when her imagination goes wild. Her mind wanders to weird places when you click objects like lights and paintings and some fourth wall breaking that glued a big smile on my face at times.  The game pokes fun at everything including itself and its staff and this charm isn’t missed.

The art style is gorgeous, with a 2D animation which looks fantastic.  The setting and objects look good but the characters, especially Amber, look very unique, which gives the game its own fantastic feeling.  The music is good but the voice acting is very good. Some characters are not as good as others but Amber and Ted are great.

All of these aspects can be undone easily by bad gameplay and as many point and click adventures do it can get obscure with puzzles at times.  For the most part you need to find objects and regularly combine them in the right way.  There were some issues like a rope to cut where I tried to use a sword, which the character said no to, but when I used the knife it worked.

This seemed arbitrary, but most of the time Ted regularly is able to help if you click him.  I also found it hard to tell on occasion which were items or part of the scenery. This is a flaw created by the beautiful design, which does result in a little random clicking at times.

Bear With Me is a beautiful, sweet, dark, funny story that oozes with character.  Amber’s story is well worth enjoying, as it’s only short episode lengths of a couple of hours it never overstays its welcome.