I will be absolutely transparent: I hated this game. I was neutral going into it - I dislike point-and-clicks generally, but enjoy mystery and noir, so tentative optimism? - and I couldn’t far into it before I recognised how much my absolute frustration with it was going to colour this review. This is a review that does not reflect a full playthrough, but one which I hope does reflect enough of a playthrough to give a sense of the game and why I feel the way I do. It may be there’s something glorious I’m missing, deeper in. I don’t happen to have enough faith in this game to carry me to whatever beautiful thing might be waiting deeper in this story.

“I am a noir detective who is going to noir all over this noir.”

What, then, is Bear With Me? As I mentioned, Bear With Me is a point and click noir mystery. You play as Amber, a girl out to solve the mystery of her missing brother, and the greater mystery of what is happening in Paper City. She solves mystery alongside her old and grumpy partner, Ted E. Bear. Together, they brave the world of clickable puzzles, mysterious happenings, and a dark and stormy night.

There’s a lot of potential here. Point and clicks aren’t my favourite, but they work so well when paired with mysteries. The ABC Murders is a fantastic example of how this can work, where the need to pay attention to detail is paired with needing to have a keen investigative mind and an eye for puzzles. I’d argue mystery games are one of the best uses of point and click mechanics, at least when done well. You want your player to turn over every object in search of clues. You want them to engage with the world. It’s a natural fit.

When done well. This is the first issue with Bear With Me. Though it understands the rough dimensions of a point and click, it has no idea how to fill them in. Its world is full of clickable objects, but the process of clicking them becomes deeply tedious, discouraging the player from clicking anything. Every object clicked either leads to a slow walk to that object, or to a monologue about it. Engaging with objects and following the rules of the genre can lead to the character either narrating every action, or insulting the player for having a different logic than the game’s developers. The process of engaging with the game’s core mechanic becomes a deeply unpleasant one.

Her words, not mine.

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with having dialogue or a bit of speech peppering up the action. It’s nice to have a character who engages with the world, or expresses their thoughts about it. However, for these sorts of spoken interlude to work, they need to be well-written, well-delivered, and have a sense of how much time they actually take. For the last element, when there are a dozen objects in a room to be clicked, and each is accompanied by three lines of dialogue, the game’s action grinds to a halt, replaced with commentary.

Some commentary can work well. When the commentary helps build the world or the character, it’s a good way to ease the player into the story that’s being told. Life is Strange and its sequels are a fantastic example of this. For those games, objects vary from having commentary, to having an additional action, or to triggering some new setting. Each object has a sense of mystery that drives the player to want to interact with it. When objects do have commentary, that commentary is brief enough to plausibly be a character’s small thought about it, and to not drag down the game. Being confronted by a room with a dozen clickable objects ceases to be an exercise in patience. Instead, it becomes an adventure of seeing what each object means, what it conjures, and what you’ll get to do with it.

The ABC Murders is similar. There, rather than having the action each object triggers be new, each object becomes part of the fabric of the mystery. Clicking it brings up a comment of how it relates to the mystery, or a closer look at the object that the player can then engage with. Objects become part of the puzzle themselves, and clicking them is part of the mystery-solving process. Poirot’s comments build his character, yes, but do so while furthering the gameplay and the adventure as a whole.

Bear With Me does none of this. The character (Amber) will comment on the object, with that commentary being slow or adding nothing in particular to the story or the mystery. It potentially builds her character and how she sees the world, but her character is not elaborate enough to justify the amount of commentary, nor is the commentary detailed enough to create a compelling character. The driving force of Bear With Me is its narrative, and the act of trying to engage with that narrative becomes tedious to the point of aggravation.

i do not want to click these things

Of course, these commentary interludes could be tolerable if they were well-written and well-delivered. It’s the absolute lack of either that had me going from passively disliking to actively hating this game.

Noir is a genre that relies on its writing and its ability to weave worlds out of the threads of loose words. The dark and stormy night trope is as evocative it is because of the imagery that’s brought into being. Noir, to succeed, requires its writing to be image-laden and full of dispassionate passion. It requires the reader to care about not only the mystery, but those who are solving it.

Bear With Me’s writing isn’t stellar. It isn’t the worst writing - currently, that prize is still held by Antioch: Scarlet Bay - but neither is it good. It’s passable, which, for this genre, this style, and the ubiquity of the commentary, is not good enough. Even then, in some ways, it’s still worse than Antioch: Scarlet Bay’s writing. That writing still built a world and characters, even if it did so in the most disjointed and baffling way possible. Its writing didn’t actively throw me out of the world and quash any interest I had in exploring the world. Bear With Me’s was passable to the point of tedium. It is utterly mediocre, and that is somehow worse than being awful.

“The dame was loaded from the start”

It’s the delivery, though, that really highlights exactly how bad the writing is. Some of the voice acting is perfectly decent. As frequent as Amber’s commentary is, it’s a welcome relief that her voice acting is perfectly acceptable.

Amber, however, is not the only main character. She is accompanied by Ted E. Bear. If this game were not made in 2016, I would have sworn that he had no voice actor, and was instead an AI, delivering its best impression of an emotionless performance. It was in listening to Bear gruff-grumble his way through poorly written lines that turned me off the game entirely. Other performances range from lack-luster to fine, but when the main character’s voice seems interchangeable with a poorly done AI, no amount of good writing can save it.

And the writing, to be clear, is not good.

i will punt you through that hole you terrible little robot-voiced monstrosity

There isn’t any one thing wrong with Bear With Me. It isn’t mechanically broken to the point of unplayability, nor is it particularly immediately awful. Instead, it’s the amalgamation of its misunderstandings of every genre it belongs to that utterly and completely destroy it. It does not understand how to use the mechanics of a point and click in a mystery game, or indeed, how to make a point and click flow at all. It does not understand the importance of compelling writing in a mystery, let alone a noir mystery. It does not understand what makes a good voice acting performance. It does not understand how important each of these elements is, and how combining a sub-par version of each of them creates a sum that is so, so much worse than any of its parts.

Developer: Exordium Games

Genre: Point And Click, Noir

Year: 2016

Country: Croatia

Language: English

Play Time: 7-10 Hours

Youtube: https://youtu.be/Jeyl_u7f5Xw