Naughty Bear: The wrongest game of all

Review Podgamer Recommended

The wrongest game of all

by RevStu (November 12th, 2010 at 3:25 pm)

Oh, this is wrong. It’s so, SO wrong. It’s ultra-wrong. It’s the wrongest thing ever. It’s Naughty Bear.

The bears of Perfection Island are having a party, with yummy cupcakes for all. But they haven’t invited Naughty Bear. This makes Naughty Bear sad. And when Naughty Bear is sad, things happen. Bad things.

Specifically, what happens is basically Pac-Man. Though you wouldn’t guess it from the screenshots on the App Store page, Naughty Bear is essentially the missing link between Pac-Man and Grand Theft Auto. Most of the game takes place in an overhead-viewed scrolling maze, in the style of games like Pac-Man World, with the ghosts replaced by various types of bear, and Pac-Man replaced by Naughty Bear.

Naughty Bear runs around the hedge maze scoffing cupcakes, and looking for weapons. When he finds one, be it a baseball bat, a golf club or a large butcher’s knife, the other bears get frightened and run away. If he catches them – and he probably will, because having a weapon gets Naughty Bear excited and makes him run faster – Naughty Bear punishes the other bears for hurting his feelings. Occasionally, this punishment is shown in a brief close-up cutscene of immense wrongness.

There are two modes of play – Story and Challenge, comprising 27 stages each. Challenge rounds are timed score attacks whereas Story levels set Naughty Bear specific challenges such as eating 40 cupcakes or chastising 6 bears, but all play in the same way – a swipe sets Naughty Bear moving, and he keeps moving in that direction (following the maze walls when necessary) until you swipe a different one. Weapons are picked up and used automatically, and the maze has lots of little hides where Naughty Bear can conceal himself if he’s unarmed. He needs these, because if he should encounter another bear while not carrying a weapon, the other bear will catch him and slap him in the face, to the sounds of cruel (and wrong) laughter. The other bears are mean to Naughty Bear.

That’s pretty much the story of Naughty Bear. We could criticise it for being repetitive and short (Story Mode will barely detain you for an hour) or for inexplicably lacking a simple Arcade mode where you just played until your three lives were gone, but that would be very mean of us, especially since it’s currently free (if it’s gone back up to £1.79/€2,39/$2.99 by the time you’re reading this, you can try the Lite version) and since poor Naughty Bear is already constantly chided by the game’s narrator for his naughtiness, rather oddly in the style of the immortal Mr C from The Shamen being played by Geoffrey from Rainbow.

We’re sure Naughty Bear will learn his lesson soon, and everyone on Perfection Island will live in blissful harmony again. Even if that’s because everyone who isn’t Naughty Bear is lying bleeding to death in a horribly wrong heap of their own entrails, fur and teeth. Goodnight, children! Don’t have nightmares!