Enviro-Bear 2010

Things can’t be much fun for the grizzly bear. With winter’s icy grip approaching, these noble beasts have got a lot to contend with before they can hole up for the season.

Not only do they have to worry about getting enough food into them to last out the hibernation period, they’ve also got to tax and insure the car. Wait, what?

If you haven’t been monitoring the indie game scene for the past year or so, you’ll probably have missed Enviro-Bear 2010. Depending on your predilection for surreal humour and deliberately awkward game design, that’ll either be a good or a bad thing.

You take control of a hungry bear as the countdown to winter begins. In this case it’s precisely five minutes away, so you must stuff as much fish and as many berries as possible down your grizzly gullet before heading for a nearby cave (and the next level).

The good news is that the bears in this universe get to speed around in bright orange hatchbacks. The bad news is that, in a rare glimpse of realism, they’re absolutely terrible drivers.

In your particular bear’s case, it can’t even use three of its four limbs. Rather, its right paw has to multi-task, changing between ‘Reverse’ and ‘Drive’ gears (so that’s why there aren’t any bears in the UK – they couldn’t handle manual gears), steering, working the pedals, and reaching out to grab any food that flops through the sun roof.

In practice this works out as a cross between a casual multi-tasker – with your index finger working overtime to keep moving and eating simultaneously – and a rudimentary physics simulator.

Objects that fall into your car (including pine cones, angry badgers, and wasps) have real weight and substance, affecting your steering and (most annoyingly) pushing down on the accelerator and brake pedals.

It has to be said that this gameplay is incredibly frustrating and counter-intuitive. While this is obviously intentional, there’s only so much of it you can take in a single sitting. I couldn’t stand it for longer than five minutes at a time, but your mileage may vary.

Equally divisive will be the game’s visuals. I found the child-like 'my first MS Paint picture' visuals to be charming and distinctive, but others will justifiably think that it’s just poor drawing hiding behind a thick veil of irony.

That Enviro-Bear 2010 will polarise opinion so much is no bad thing. Who says that every game has to have mass-market appeal? It does mean, though, that the Android Market’s much-maligned refund feature will be a welcome recourse for many.