Bear With Me: The Lost Robots Review

My brother and sister-in-law find driving anywhere with me amusing, but probably a little irritating. The reason for this is my insistence on leaning to one side and saying “rawr” whenever their sat-nav says to bear left or right on an upcoming road. I can’t help it, I enjoy puns too much to not do it. I also enjoy point-and-click adventure games, as is evidenced by the sheer number that I’ve reviewed on GameGrin. So it’s no surprise that when a game came in for review that combined my favourite genre with my favourite gag, I jumped on it quicker than a spaniel on a dropped sausage. 

Bear With Me: The Lost Robots is actually the second game in the series, after a trilogy of episodic releases made up the first game last year. It’s set before that game though, and therefore serves as a perfect starting point for newcomers, as well as a great game with plenty of allusions to the developer’s earlier work for those who are already familiar with our furry friend. Personally, I played this game first and I didn’t feel I missed out as a result, so don’t worry if you haven’t played the “first” Bear With Me.

The game puts you straight into the action in the middle of the story, which is an old fashioned detective story in a classical noir setting. With hand-drawn greyscale graphics, it’s evocative of the classic detective films of the 40s and that doesn’t seem to be unintentional by any stretch of the imagination. 

The game is pretty true to the old fashioned formula of point-and-click games, if you’ve played Sam and Max then you know pretty much what to expect here. The puzzles are generally pretty well defined with enough clues to get you through them, but not so many as to be patronising. There are, as is usually the case with games of this genre, a few puzzles that aren’t obvious. These cause the usual “rub everything against everything else” moments. Fortunately, these aren’t any more common than any other point-and-click.

When those difficult puzzle moments arrive, that’s when one of the game’s small flaws starts to show up. Interacting with an object closes the inventory screen and puts the object back in there. If you’re planning on trying all of your inventory as a possible solution, you’ll have to keep reopening the inventory and dragging. That brings me to another bugbear (pun intended) that I have with the UI; there’s only control by thumbsticks. With the Switch having perfectly good motion control, I don’t see why I can’t use the joy-con to control the pointer like was usually possible on the Wii. I get that it’s not the current flavour of the month gimmick any more, but I felt that games like this were the kind of place where that control scheme was most suitable. It’s not a game-breaker but it’s annoying.

The voice acting is also a little spotty. Some of it is excellent, and some of it is very poor. Sadly, our titular Ted E Bear is in the latter camp. His lines are delivered in a relaxed monotone like Morgan Freeman after a mug of cocoa, and just don’t seem to express much emotion. After a while I ended up turning the sound off and reading subtitles, which is a shame as clearly there was a lot of work put into giving all the characters full voice acting, but sadly I just found the most commonly heard one to be grating.

Poor voice acting notwithstanding, there’s a great story to be found in Bear With Me: The Lost Robots, so I still wouldn’t hesitate to recommend playing it, and I will continue to play it to completion after this review. It’s not the new Monkey Island, but it’s still beary enjoyable and has encouraged me to check out the other games in the series. It’s got a few rough edges, but nothing too unbearable. It’s definitely worth getting your paws on this one and I’d recommend it bear claws I had an ursome experience playing it. One fur the wishlist of anybody who wants a good point-and-click to paws the time.