Bear With Me: The Complete Collection

The art style of the game is amazing, making it the worth the price (especially if you get it on sale for dirt cheap...). Environment and character design are top notch, along with the soundtrack and the voice over (wasn't sure about the Bear's voice initially, but after getting used to it I actually really enjoyed it). Gameplay wise, it's meh - not very imaginative, basic point & click fare. Characters move very slowly and it all feels a bit stiff and clunky. The writing is hit or miss, and not always good at riding the line between spoof and poorly written homage of the Noir genre. There are also way, way too many pop culture references and 4th wall breaks - things that we have all seen a million times, but that writers still seem to think are clever.

I like the visual style of the game, and the plot is interesting as well. However, unfortunately the writers aren't as clever as they obviously think they are. A lot of the humor just doesn't land and the characters start rambling way too often. Also, there are too many cutscene-like sections where the story just advances itself. Overall it's not a terrible game, but could've been a lot better. If you want to give it a try, at least wait for a discount.

I'm really enjoying this point-and-click adventure. It's a little silly, a bit dark, filled with spoken dialogue that's well performed, and and excellent background music. Of course this reminds me of the film Ted which also featured a sarcastic living teddy bear, but this game stands on its own as a spoof of film noir tropes packed with cultural easter eggs. All in all, this is a relaxing, fun game that I highly recommend.

The graphics are very nice and the story is enjoyable. The puzzles, though, are on the mediocre side. They're set up so that you have to solve them in sequence. So, if you're stuck in a puzzle, you're stuck in the entire game. Also, while you can skip animations when moving from a location to the other, you can't do that while interacting with objects. And characters walk veeery slowly in this game. Still about the puzzles, many times you're almost there and the character keep saying it's nonsense, then you make one tiny step and everything makes sense to them as well. Some minimal clue on that regard would have improved the playability a lot. Finally, you surely can't speak of pixel hunting here, but many times you're stuck just because you didn't pick up a random object. There is no highlight of interactable objects (the name appears, but it's not that noticeable and the bounding box are often of "questionable" size) and, being the graphics a mere scale of gray (which is nice for the aesthetics, not so much for the playability), you pass by many things because they don't look like you're supposed to do anything with them. In the end, it's undoubtably a nice game that (in my opinion, at last) markets itself as easy-to-pick but lacks many quality-of-life features to keep its promise. On the other hand, it's not a classic either, so things you would forgive to games like Gabriel Knight and such, here just add up to the frustration.