Genre: General
Website: http://www.enviro-bear.com/
Shane:
- Platform: Android
- Hours logged: 1.0
- Playthroughs: 0
- Rating: --/10
- Shane (5/9/2014): Well... You play a bear. In a car. You have a single paw with which to control direction, acceleration and braking, and vector. Oh boy.
This game is beautiful. It is complexity hidden behind simplicity in a way that makes my scalp tingle. Don't get me wrong, it is a pain in the ass to play and it really shouldn't be rewarded because of that, but so many of it's elements are... well... they are REALLY NEAT.
Things on screen interact with each other. That is what makes it so cool for me. Let me see if I can explain. The plot is simple. Eat enough food to let yourself hibernate before the time runs out and winter descends upon you. (The graphic for this is your screen filling with large white snowballs. Seeing it makes me sad.) Note: There is no food in the car with you when you start. You have to collect the food by running over either ponds or bushes with little red berries. This causes a number of fish or berries, respectively, to drop into your car, presumably through the open sunroof. Dragging those food items in front of your mouth results in them being consumed in the case of the berries and converted into skeletons in the case of the fish.
This brings us to the interaction part. Those skeletons I mentioned? They get in the way. If you drop them on the gas peddle, they will depress it causing acceleration in whichever direction your transmission is set. If they somehow end up underneath the gas peddle they will prevent acceleration and you will have to fish it out (hehe) in order to proceed to a cave to hibernate. It isn't just fish skeletons though. Running into other objects drops other things into your car.
Running into some of the trees will drop badgers into your car's cabin (For some Dada-ish reason.) These angry fuckers will flail around and shift your car, jack with the steering, hit the gas or the break, knock fish or other things out of the car... I actually lost one game because the damn badger pitched my timer out the window. At least I think that is why I lost that one. Could have just been a system crash but I liked the narrative better the other way.
I didn't play this one for all that long. Not yet. It remains to be seen if there is some form of playthrough possible. I hope that there is. Maybe there would be other kinds of food or ... how about a yeti stomping through the forest, playing rugby with the driving bears? (I hope I dream about rugby yetis someday. Please let that be a thing.) I just want to say "Thank you" to whomever created this thing. It was a wonderful distraction from more serious things. It also gave me the strong urge to play some games that are a bit more polished.
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