Grizzly Man review – yet more pulpy brilliance
Bears, a recent TikTok video suggested to me, are friend-coded. Why is that? Honestly, they look so cuddly. We give stuffed fabric versions of them to children and share videos of them waving as we pass by in SUVs. Speaking of SUVs, we know that, like most animals on the planet, bears are having a hard time because of us. There’s guilt there, and tenderness. And yet if we were to meet a bear in the wild, it would be – well, it would be incredibly bad news for us.
Grizzly Man reviewPublisher: LCB Game StudioDeveloper: LCB Game StudioPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on 17th January on PC.
And when you meet them, what are you meant to do? Stay still? Run? Climb a tree? Are you meant to whistle, or are you only meant to whistle before you’ve met a bear, in order to preemptively scare it off?
All questions to ponder while you work your way through Grizzly Man. This is not the documentary about the guy who went to live with bears. It’s an interactive pulp fiction about a group of hikers who are menaced by a bear. Not just any bear, the Grizzly Man – half bear, half…something else. The product of CIA meddling and drug programs, sure, but also the product of millenia of humans living around bears, all that primal fear and confusion. What to do? Run? Climb a tree? Whistle?
Grizzly Man is the latest from LCB Game Studio, who may be my favourite outfit in game design at the moment. For the last few years this tiny team has been turning out pulp interactive fictions at an astonishing pace. They look like cursed early 90s PC games, with static art for the most part and a text parser which means you interact and shape the story when you can by selecting options on the screen, and occasionally tabbing through a mini-game. Fernando Martinez Ruppel does the art and Nico Saraintaris writes the story, and what you get is a series of gorgeously lurid stills that flicker past as a tale of dread and the unknown unfolds. But it’s never an empty tale of spooks and false shocks. There’s always something human being plucked away at deep inside the story, something that elevates and leaves you pondering more than just who did what and when is X going to be bludgeoned by Y.
