T0ast On Jam: Naughty Bear Retrospective

Naughty Bear is a poor excuse for what could have been a great game, an outstanding game if they’d put nearly as much effort into its development as they had its advertising campaign, what with all those clever little horror/thriller cult-classics being recreated in the game’s own style.

As I mentioned in my review of the game, it is shallow. Of course, shallow is an understatement since if games can be likened to swimming pools, then most would be your typical backyard variety, games such as Bioshock may be likened to Olympic-size diving pool and Naughty Bear would be an inch-deep puddle.

After the first hour, you have seen all there is to see and the game then becomes boring, tedious, pointless and truly mindless. If we look at the raw ingredients that Artificial Mind & Movement had to work with when developing this game: a serial killing bear for a protagonist, a an island full of unsuspecting bears, everybody talks in squeaks, there are all sorts of fantastical permutations of bears (robots, zombies, unicorns, aliens, Marines) and to top it all off you have a bedtime story narrator guiding you every step of the way with a very persuasive voice, it’s even more surprising that the game failed.

What I have listed above are the ingredients for an amazing, original and laugh-out-loud funny game. As history has taught us, just having the right ingredients is not enough, you have to work hard, you need to be driven with the single-minded goal of making that cake. A cook book isn’t a bad idea either. Of course, if Portal taught us anything, all that hard work may not result in you ending up with that perfect cake that you’ve been working towards. GTA IV is a case in point, Rockstar had the ingredients, the cook book and the know how to make a triple-layer fudge brownie supreme cake but decided to instead make a pound cake with lots and lots of 100’s & 1000’s thrown over it.

What I’m trying to get at is that A2M screwed up and let a perfect opportunity to put themselves on the map slip through their fingers. A quick glance over their previous titles will reveal that they have done just about no original games, about 90% of their work lies in licensed games and although their most recent titles are at least original works, they were not exactly well received. The PSP version of Dante’s Inferno was met with tepid response while WET was criticised for much the same things as Naughty Bear: its shallowness and repetitive nature.

Perhaps what I should be saying then is that the developer has screwed up yet another opportunity to get recognised as a major creator of big name games. Perhaps the studio is simply not capable of producing a good game. That would certainly go a long way to explaining why they’re content producing shitty little licensed games with titles like  Ed, Edd n Eddy: The Mis-Edventures or worse still High School Musical: Makin’ the Cut!

In its development stages, Naughty Bear promised to at the very least be entertaining but in retrospect (yeah, wouldn’t expect to find that word in here) the abject lack of gameplay trailers save for those that got released right before E3 perhaps alluded to the fact that there really was not much to show.

There is an overall lack of effort evident in just about every aspect of the game’s design. In fact, Naughty Bear could easily have passed for one of A2M’s poorly developed, badly done licensed games. The character models are arcane, the textures comparable to that of poorly made papier-mâché and the over-the-top violence loses its edge fast once you’ve seen the same kill animations half a dozen times each.

Perhaps the problem lies in that A2M was too intent on making a full boxed game instead of a much shorter, much smaller, downloadable game. Had they done this, the game could have ended after Naughty Bear gets his initial bit of revenge for not being invited to the Big Birthday Party and the sequences leading up to this could the just be stretched out to accommodate. The graphics would then have made perfect sense and so would everything else.

In fact, the more and more I think about it, Naughty Bear would have made a great downloadable game on PSN or XBL but like all other things in life it came down to a choice and A2M made the wrong one.

One thing that really got to me was the lack of any real purpose that you feel once you reach the halfway mark in the game. In any normal game, this is the point where things start building up to the final level and usually means that things will become a lot more exciting and engaging. Not the case here. Once you reach Chapter 4/7 in the games story, it will be plainly evident that the narrative is little more than a series of truly arbitrary events strung together in an uncohesive and meaningless amalgamation of missions. To give you an example, Chapter 4 sees a couple of bears being invited over to the chef’s cabin for a cooking lesson, then the chef just so happens to have a spell book of dark sorcery conveniently placed next to his cook book and what a shocker, he takes the spell book by mistake. For some inexplicable reason he does not notice this and proceeds to read from the spell book as if it were telling him how to make waffles, all the while uttering an incantation which ends up summoning the undead Zombears. What the F**K?

At no point are you given explanation as to why or how such as thing can occur but you are then tasked with getting revenge on the chef for summoning the Zombears. Last time I checked, that’s punishing someone for doing something wrong which is a good act, essentially. It doesn’t fit the general profile of getting revenge for things done to or against Naughty Bear personally.

But by far the saddest exhibit of poor effort is that every bear in the entire game , whether it be a main target or somebody that you kill within 2min of starting the level, will have one of a handful of names ranging from Daddles to Sunburst to Cozy and several others. It strikes me as odd that there are only 6 or 7 names between roughly 80 – 100 seemingly different bears although I’m not surprised considering what the rest of the game is like.

Naughty Bear is the unloved bastard child of a father who failed woodwork with a GG and an inadequate mother who suffers from foetal-alcohol syndrome. There was a slim chance that it could have accomplished something but the odds were always against it and it will soon fade out of memory, only to be dredged up again when people start throwing around words like “top-ten” or “failures”. A big hi-five to whoever conceived the concept of Naughty Bear but I strongly recommend that A2M stay out of the big leagues and go back to making the next big failure that nobody will ever know about.

[Image: IGN]