A Bear's Night Out - author David Dyte
  (Inform, Freeware, PC version part of SynTax Disk 1214)

                  Reviewed by John Ferris

Another entry in the 1997 IF competition, A Bear's Night Out has
the player taking the part of a teddy bear. The bear's owner,
David, has forgotten about tomorrow's picnic, so teddy has to make
all the preparations. The game calls itself a children's game, but
the difficulty level is too high for the age group who would be
into soft toys (the first time around, that is).

The game is set inside David's flat which turns out not to be as
dull a setting as it could have been, since a teddy bear's view of
the world is somewhat different (lower) than our own. Once out of
bed, teddy has to explore the flat in an attempt to find out what
to do. The clues to this are there, though it took me a while to
figure it out. It pays to be very curious about everything.
There's one NPC in the game, Holly the cat. Holly is well written
and can often be seen doing cat-like things in the background. I
spent a lot of the game being worried about the sort of cat-soft
toy interaction that results in lots of fluff but if you treat her
right she's just a big pussy cat.

The puzzles are on the whole logical and clever, although the
solution to the dark location was found by accident. The author
insists the solution works in real life, but as I don't own one of
those objects I would never had guessed. At least finding the
solution by accident is inevitable

One thing I will give away is that this is one of those games
where some objects have to be examined more than once. In
hindsight you can see the logic, but it does go against
convention. I did like the way some puzzles had more than one
solution and I was impressed at how well the tape recorder code
had been written. In fact the game understood most of what I was
trying to do, although the "unlock" command was a bit dim. I don't
like to be asked "with what" when I'm carrying the only key
because I'm not going to try using the ukulele, am I?

As for atmosphere, the descriptions are short but adequate and
most of the atmosphere was created in my mind. The worry about the
cat, trying to keep time limits (although there's only one) and
the knowledge that almost everything in the game had a purpose. It
managed not to be childish or too cute and there is a lot to hold
the player's interest, not least the number of references to other
games that can be found. Oh yes, there's one surreal moment that
worked against the atmosphere but I didn't find any bugs*.

In summary, A Bear's Night Out is a short, well-written game of
about average difficulty, well worth the download.

A Bear's Night Out can be downloaded from the if- archive at
ftp.gmd.de in the 1997 IF Competition directory along with a
solution, if required.

*Although with my play-testing performance on Zero Sum, I wouldn't
take my word for it :-)

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