Finding Teddy

RetroSpider  2016.04.26. 16:21

 

The story of Finding Teddy is very simple: a little girl sleeps at night with her dearest teddy bear, but in the meanwhile, a mysterious monster steals the plush toy. The girl wakes up after her teddy was taken and -just like in Narnia- she goes into the wardrobe to enter another world to look for the cute bear.

 

 

Finding Teddy is a point-and-click game, it only requires a mouse to control our heroine -or our fingertip if we play this game on Android. The girl can be moved by clicking or tapping to the edges of the screen or to places where she can crawl or climb into or she can take objects. On Android, clicking on objects is a bit harder than with a mouse on PC, but this was okay, due to screen resolutions.

 

 

 

The graphics are taking back to the good old pixelated era, it's somewhere inbetween 8 and 16 bit. The colours of our enviroment are vivid: the forests have natural shades of green, the swamp has yellowish and grayish colours, the caves have mysterious purple colours, in short: the whole enviroment feels natural, yet imaginary. However, our heroine is grayscaled and this is something that really pops out when looking at the screen. Why? I have a theory about it which I will tell later...

 

 

 

The music is fitting to the enviroment and mood, for example the forest zone has a calm and relaxing instrumental piece which is spiced up with birds singing, the graveyard has only the sound effects of rain falling and lightning sometimes etc. Almost all tracks have chiptunes as well, it enhanced to the pixelated atmosphere. Just like the game itself, the soundtrack is simple, yet melodic in its own way.

 

   

 

 

On the other hand, Finding Teddy has its own mistakes unfortunately: the game can be completed in 3 hours or less completing it with the achievements as well. The puzzle parts are easy, except for the singing parts which can be a bit harder sometimes if the player won't guess the secret of the musical notes. Also, most of the achievements are nothing but deaths, for example death by a spider, death by a crocodile etc. so these are easy to be achieved. We can unlock an alternate ending on New Game + mode and we can get new skins for our heroine as well: the real colours of herself or a spiderhead which helps us finding the fireflies. The fireflies gives us not only an achievement when we collect them all, but also unlocks concept arts of the game.

 

Overall: Finding Teddy is a short indie point-and-click adventure with cute graphics and story and charming atmosphere with music that is matching very well to it. Let's hope that the sequel will be better in the future (Finding Teddy 2). I recommend it to everyone who wants to jump into a pixelated and colourful adventure.

 

 

Platform: PC (Steam), Android

Year: 2013.

 

 

Extra: What is the message of Finding Teddy?

 

I think that the our heroine had no colours for a good reason. Anyone could ask in himself or herself: "Why do I feel gray when everything around me is colourful and full of life?" The girl is grayscaled, which symbolizes the times when we can feel gray too due to the grayness of those days, when we have a bad mood. If we don't let ourselves sink into this grayness, we can find our own colourful world too by looking inside our hearts, our soul. If we found colours in hearts -happiness, joy of life-, then we can return to the world once more, fulfilled with energy in a world full of colours.

Grayness could symbolize the bad mood in our hearts, just think about how many people we helped out during our journey who were sad and gray coloured; and after we helped them they became colourful and happy again. At the end of the journey, we became happy too and we returned with our teddy bear too.

 

If I could summerize the message of the game, I would quote a Hungarian poet, Mih�ly V�r�smarty:

 

"Speak, think, do the right things and every word, thought and act will reflect smile back clearly at you like a mirror."