Fat Bear

The best preparation to help ensure you enjoy Fat Bear is to have a map ready in landscape mode, or download a map from the Internet. It's not that it has a ton of extraneous locations, but rather, many puzzles take a couple rooms, and the map grows into a pretty big world which burst the bounds of my first map draft. There was a lot to do. It was worth doing. Also, there are no spoilers in a straightforward map, as any location not immediately accessible is, well, somewhat blocked off by humans who want to bear-proof their dwellings.

You can pretty much guess what sort of FB will be from the cheery cover art. And even better, the humor avoids cheap fat jokes, although your weight is a factor in some of the puzzles--if you haven't eaten enough, you aren't heavy enough to do something. There are twelve meals to find, which replaces the usual score. It's a fresh variation on the tried and worn treasure hunt, even if some food is described as not fresh for comedic effect. Some foods I expected. Some, I didn't. Nothing too gross, just--well, you aren't going to uncover fine cuisine in the wilderness. They're a lot more fun than the usual gold and jewels and priceless artwork and so forth.

The puzzles start out trivial ("Sitting on the ground here is a cupcake. It's the last of a batch you swiped from some little human scouts last night after you scared them away" with a helpless berry bush a few rooms over) before requiring more thought and even some timing. They work well, as does the world. You don't see a lot of people, because they're scared of you even if you don't ROAR or GROWL (a nice game-specific command.) Townspeople flee at the sight of you, and even the park rangers you need to outwit stay back, since they're not in the hunting business. The terrain spans an airstrip, a riverbed, two cabins (one reputable, one not,) a fire tower, lots of woodland, and a small town with a gas station and restaurant. The puzzle variety, including a chase where having a loop to walk in is handy, validates the large map, which would otherwise be slightly at odds with the competition's goal. And I'd definitely hate to see this game cut down to five puzzles. Twelve feels about right.

There's some stuff I didn't pick up on, which doesn't mean the clues aren't there, but you might want to watch for them. Your weight plays a factor in some puzzles. You aren't heavy enough to break certain things, until you've scored enough points--I mean, eaten enough. In one location, you need to run back and forth before you cause a thin roof to collapse, but it wasn't obvious to me. The raccoon's purpose was clear without being cliched to me and my minimal outdoorsman experience.

There are ways to lose, too, but they're pretty clearly marked, and they take a good deal of dawdling, or the game outright says "It's a good idea to save here." For instance, at the park rangers' cabin, you have to get their attention and then cause some comic property destruction. You can kill yourself in the process, or you can just sit around and not try to break into the cabin. They then hit you with a stun gun. It's not the most serious risk you face, as later on, there's a person who dislikes you very much indeed.

But by then the light-hearted "break things already kind of broken" tone has been established. I enjoyed revisiting and enjoying the jokes/puzzles at a slightly faster pace, with the assistance of a map. There was some stuff which felt like it could be fixed in a quick post-comp release (you could EAT some things without GETting them) but that will probably be obsolete by the time anyone reads this looking for old Text Adventure Literacy games. (Also, I didn't check if softlocking yourself out of maximum points blocks the good ending, but that I'd look forward to replaying it to check this says a lot.) It's an entertaining world to poke around in, and if the size is a bit intimidating, it's pretty clear what to do in the endgame, because there's just one thing left. In the meantime, you build up a good variety of verbs to solve puzzles, and it feels old school in that way, but not in the guess the verb way. So even though you as the bear can't speak and can only ROAR, you wind up doing a lot. The end is surprisingly dramatic and a bit dark, so be warned there. But it's well paced and a good conclusion, fitting details beyond "I haven't gotten inside that building yet" together.

FB took a lot of time to get through, but I was involved enough, it wasn't until after that I wondered if my character burned more calories running around than they gained from eating their meals. When I replayed it to write this review, I didn't burn as many calories--the puzzles all made sense. But I slightly missed that sense of wandering around.