Playing A Game Finding Teddy PC

Brief and modest as it is, Finding Teddy manages to embody almost everything that I hate about "classic"-styled point-and-click adventure games:

  • The controls are bad. Clickable hotspots are big, but hard to spot, leading to an unreasonably high incidence of mis-clicks. And the game's few puzzle-like mechanics are very poorly explained, if at all.
  • Items and puzzle solutions are absurdly nonsensical. These things make Monkey Island 2's "monkey wrench" look downright intuitive. This shit is pretty bananas.
  • There is a central puzzle mechanic that involves spelling things with shapes that look like letters. Except, they don't actually look much like letters. It would be one thing if it wasn't clear that they're supposed to be letters, but even after knowing that they are, reading them is almost impossible.
  • Backtracking. For how short it is, there is a surprising amount of backtracking.
  • And, yeah. It's short.

Confession time: I didn't get very far into the game before requiring tips from a guide. I don't feel bad about it at all, either; to try and figure out what Finding Teddy was trying to tell me, without some extra hand-holding, doesn't seem like it would've been even remotely reasonable. And unfortunately, with the route clear and the solutions exposed, the game's atmosphere is pretty wanting -- a bit like Limbo, but, less interesting.

I at least have a little admiration for the artistic theme. But it isn't worth trudging through the game to experience, and it certainly isn't worth going completely insane attempting to comprehend its puzzles.

Better than: Dear Esther, I guess
Not as good as: Broken Age, The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition, Gone Home, ... the list goes on
I was considering scooping up a few more easy Steam achievements: but some of them require playing through the game a second time. No, thanks.

Progress: Finished once.

Rating: Awful