I can't really talk about the effectiveness of Bear with Me's storytelling (and its problems) without delving deep into spoilers, so up front, I'd say if you have an interest in story-driven point-and-click adventure games of a more traditional nature, give Bear with Me a chance. It's charming, makes the best out of a limited scope, and the storytelling winds up outshining a lot of eyerolling cultural references and strange peripheral choices.

Here's a slightly more spoilery take on it if that doesn't sate your interest, but don't read past this paragraph if you want to play the game.

Bear with Me, as I've stated here elsewhere a few times, is a relatively low-budget adventure game that fully recognizes its own limitations and makes fun of them at various points - for example, at one point, a boom mic drops on screen for no apparent reason. That kind of humor is pretty hit and miss even from the best writers, and here, it's kind of detracting from the real draw of the game, which is the terrific setup of a young girl on the edge of puberty and her talking stuffed bear trying to track down the girl's missing brother while interacting with a delightful bunch of anthropomorphic stuffed animals and toys (correct me if I'm wrong if there's a better term to describe inanimate stuffed animals as opposed to the usual definition of anthropomorphic). It takes place over three episodes of various length, all of which can be beaten fairly rapidly if you've had some experience with the genre before. There are a few token puzzles to pad out the length - an irritation, but a mild one - but mostly you're collecting object A to insert into object B which in turn is used on environmental object C. It's not complex stuff, and that's totally fine - in fact, it's mostly a pleasant throwback. I say mostly, because there are some heinously bad points at which you'll be pixel-hunting for objects in vague backgrounds made hazier by the (smart) choice of a gray and black color palette. Again, deeper spoilers ahead, but if that paragraph enticed you, STOP NOW AND GO PLAY IT.

Whew. This calls for a little mood music. DJ! Chop chop! And bartender, make with the scotch!

There are three episodes to Bear with Me, all of which have a fundamentally different feel to them while still following the basics of a noir-esque detective story... until it turns into something astoundingly, wonderfully different.

Episode One

The first episode is simple - Amber Ashworth and her former PI partner Ted E. Bear (yeah, it's groan-worthy, but he grew on me) have to escape the girl's house in order to find her missing brother, Flint. Of course, your progress through the house is gated by stuffed animal characters who won't let you out until you've done a thing for them or tricked them somehow. The first episode is by far the weakest of the three episodes, as some of the characters hadn't yet found their definition and the others were waylaid by the game's forward progress and forgotten about - or were straight up murdered.

Yeah. Murdered. Despite the game's cutesy look, it's not really a game for kids. Ted drops "goddamn" left and right, and some of the umor has a relatively chaste but definitely adult tinge to it. Its themes also go awfully dark towards the end of the series, which ends up contrasting nicely with the relatively innocent feel of the first half of that first episode. Everything starts to get a little darker when our characters start to get little visions of letters written on the walls in blood. It's nothing grotesque - it's mostly PG scare stuff - but it plays at the idea that things aren't qute what they seem, especially when the game's villain, a red-hooded ghost-like figure simply referred to as Red, begins to cut down the inhabitants of Amber's little world.

It's hinted at heavily in this episode that we're playing this game through the lens of Amber's overactive imagination. It's a fantastic bit of a mislead that's translated well into the second episode as Amber and Ted escape the house through a road in their attic leading to Paper City.

Episode 2

The second episode of Bear with Me takes a turn towards a more classic film feel, as Amber and Ted investigate a mobster/casino owner tied up with Red in some curious ways. In true noir fashion, nobody's as innocent as they seem, and in an interesting twist, that the seemingly villainous King Shark is really just a misguided idiot trying to protect the people of a quickly dying city.

That concept, the idea that Red's onslaught agains Paper City's citizens is really just a precursor to the end of this world Amber and Ted occupy, is the singular most fascinating part of the game as a whole, and it's one that's again dripping with misleading potential. It was my thought at this point that "Red" was a pretty blatant metaphor for a period, signifying the end of youth and the end of childhood fantasies. That's not entirely wrong, but Bear with Me had one more card to play in the overarching storyline, one I didn't anticipate. We'll get to that in a second.

The game's writing isn't always perfect. The humor generally tends to slide between cute and a bit too self-aware and not all the characters are as fully-fleshed as they could be, especially after a shocking event in the third episode that warranted a little bit of extra reaction from some of the game's secondary cast. But where it strikes hard is the allusions to a greater storyline, something happening behind the scenes that we don't quite grasp, not yet - and it's one of those rare games that actually manages a decent payoff.

Almost all of that is set up here in the second episode. King Shark's panic as Red's murder spree continues ends up bleeding well into the third episode. The corrupt elite of Paper City work well as red herring villains for the story as a whole (though more time definitely could have been commmited to fleshing them out). The side characters all feel like they know an inevitable end is coming, and give the story a tinge of anticipatory sadness.

This is a fantastic setup for the end of Bear with Me and its dark reveal.

Episode Three

It was all a dream, Amber's long-dead so-and-so have actually been alive this whole time and monitoring Super Secret Baddie Group X from a distance, and wouldn't you know it? She's not just an ordinary farm girl, but the reborn prince of Magiclandia and the only one who can take on the Dark Badguydude.

No, it's none of that.

Well... it's kind of a dream. It's a fantasy, all right, as the game's been not-so-blatantly teasing, but let's get to that in a second.

Most of the first third of the final episode has Ted chasing down Amber from place to place as she continues the hunt for Shark King and the real story behind what's going on. This leads to the reveal that Shark King's actually had a big change of heart, and dies defending Ash from the corrupt politicians and cops. It's a pretty cliched setup, offset by a trippy moment that kind of defines what works about episode three. If you leave King's body behind and come back to it, it changes shape to a basic stuffed shark. But leave again, and he's gone.

It's a small, weird touch, one I can't decide if I like or not, but I'll be damned if I'm gonna forget it easily. In the moment, it's bizarre and takes the player out of the element of chasing down Amber and the dire trouble she's in both in the clutches of the corrupt elite and the ever-present threat of Red. I don't even know if it's intentionalling alluding to the end of the series, but if it is, it's a really smart, bizarre thing to do.

Further teasing the "it's all just a fantasy in Amber's head" thing, Ted makes a quick trip to a tunnel out of Paper City, leading to a bizarre world full of color and strange realism. He plucks two things from it, a toy sword and a piece of red cloth, both symbolic of Ash's brother.

With help from friends who love and adore Miss Ashworth for unspecified reasons apart from "the city owes her for its existence," Ted manages to track down Amber... and is mortally wounded by a cop, at which point, it's revealed Amber has some crazy powers to destroy things in her world as she frees herself and obliterates the crooked cop out of existence. Ted gives a lengthy farewell to Amber in one of the game's most effective scenes, though better animation could have gone a long ways towards making it seem less stiff.

In his last moments, Ted reveals to her that the world is wrong, that something beyond the black and white world they live in isn't right, and that Amber's missing brother's room in the "color" world is empty and full of boxes.

Here's where Amber's fantasy world begins to come apart in an absolutely fascinating last act.

She travels to the tunnel too, excpet now it's become a forest - and an aggravating puzzle for the player to solve in an old-school Zelda-like maze of finding the right pattern of lefts, rights, and forwards. She finds her way through to a singular apartment building in the distance, reminiscent of somewhere she and her family used to live. With the game's most difficult puzzles out of the way, there's more of a focus on storytelling here. Amber slowly makes her way up the building via an elevator, hearing the disjointed voices of her parents reliving a moment from Amber's past.

It's revealed through a series of hazy, nightmarish scenes that Amber had a banana allergy, and was jealous of her brother for getting cookies she couldn't eat. She snuck one out of spite, driving her parents to send her to the hospital - which leads to one particularly effective scene as Amber sees herself laid out on a hospital table, with grotesqueries of doctors watching over her. As the player solves little puzzles piecing all this together, it's revealed that she lived, and her parents started to drive her home.

The next puzzle starts off as annoying and seemingly a bit of a time-filler as a "customer representative" version of Amber helps her remember an old neighbor of theirs. Little tidbits about the man are revealed - his wife died, he fell into a funk, he drank too much, and there was a fire...

...while Amber's brother was left home alone.

Yeah. Shit gets dark.

By this point, it's abundantly clear that the whole metaphorical "growing up" fantasy was a ruse and that Amber's actually had a severe mental breakdown, using her childhood toys and imaginary friends as a means to try and cope with the loss of her brother. The game's last choice (which I actually didn't realize was a choice at all because of problems with the game's smallish fonts) has her trying to decide between using the toy sword or the red cloth on the killer Red, who has finally caught up to her. Red is her psyche trying to heal itself, which is done by giving him the cloth, or she can use the sword on him, which apparently starts the whole break all over again.

My ending, the "good" one, has Amber giving a cheerful speech about how Ted helped her to realize she needs to move on, how she can't always blame herself, and that she's going to heal... but then the game ends on a darkly poignant note with Amber weeping as she stares down at a picture of her family before her brother died.

It's a brutal ending that shows there isn't just a simple cure. Things don't just get better immediately, but that doesn't mean taht Amber won't eventually figure out a way to move on somewhere down the line. It was a shocking, pretty good ending to what was an otherwise good-but-not-great game.

But.

Despite the strong central narrative, Bear with Me does have problems. The aforementioned pixel-hunting is annoying as hell. The puzzles are largely there to add minutes to the game and give you achievements for solving them faster (or in reality, being smart enough to save at the beginning of every scene and figuring them out without screw-ups). The voice acting is charming in a Wadjet Eye sort of way, but at times, it sounds like voices were recorded over the phone. There's an entire pivotal character from Episode 2 that just up and disappears. Navigation on the main map involved me waving around my mouse until I caught the glint of a place name on accident, not because it was cleverly marked with a big contrasting-colored arrow or anything that could help me actually find it.

It's not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but these little things add up. Modern adventure games don't have to all be Telltale no-interaction, straight-story types, but when a game chooses to be a traditional point-and-clicker with such a strong focus on narrative, it needs to make sure to bring the little nuances of modern adventure games with it. Taking cues from Pendulo Studio's in-game hints could have helped, or even just having a "highlight the interactives" button would have eased things tremendously.

There are also a bizarre number of moments in the early parts of episode three when the game just feels incomplete, and throughout the whole game, characters and events are often glossed over in such a way as to make me feel like they had more story to tell but just couldn't. I genuinely hope Exordium ends up with another chance to make a bigger, better game than this, because they've clearly got the formula down for wildly inventive, poignant stories with the potential to be classics. They just need a little boost to get them there.

Thanks very much for reading.