Bearly Escape Hands-On: An Arcade Adventure Filled With Critters & Claw Machines

Bearly Escape tests your dexterity with a mixture of approachable platforming puzzles and moreish claw machine challenges.

Claw machines can be frustrating and complex beasts. Not only do you require precision and nimble hands to best them, you also need disposable cash to keep trying when you inevitably fail. Developed by Time Traveller, Bearly Escape is an alternative to sinking your life savings into an arcade machine, offering players an opportunity to test their dexterity in virtual reality through a series of animal-saving missions.

Set in a mysterious woodland, you step into the shoes of a young boy who, while searching for his lost dog, uncovers a strange conspiracy. This once bustling forest is now devoid of creatures, thanks to the antagonist, Dr. Kidd. With a beloved pet missing and a slew of creatures trapped, you must navigate the forest, uncovering hidden labs and saving the creatures of the world. The story isn’t that exciting and doesn’t offer much for you to grab onto, yet it’s a reasonable enough backbone to Bearly Escape's versatile gameplay suite.

In Bearly Escape, your time is split between three distinct play styles: first-person puzzles, third-person platforming, and claw machine challenges. While this genre-flipping process sounds like a lot, it’s fairly straightforward in practice. Each level begins with the player controlling a bear avatar from a bird's-eye perspective across increasingly complex platforming levels.

Using the joystick on the controller, you direct the little bear, using the buttons to jump, smack objects and free animals that have been caught in traps. Occasionally, you'll also need to interact with the level itself, grabbing and moving blocks with your other controller to help get the bear across the level. This process feels great in VR and while there isn’t a lot of diversity with the obstacles, it's fun to feel like a parent guiding my vulnerable bear to safety.

Eventually, you’ll come across a lab, upon which Bearly Escape flips into first-person mode and asks you to solve classic puzzles such as fixing an image by sliding tiles or directing power to a door by orienting pipes. The tried-and-tested puzzle configurations are reliable and fun to work through, but the real excitement arrives once you successfully resolve them and enter the lab. Here is where you’ll interact with the game's most engaging and unique aspect, the claw machine minigames.

Each lab contains a claw machine filled with petrified animals. Using the controllers, one hand focuses on maneuvering the claw with a digital joystick, while the other hand hits the button to engage the claw. Just like real-world UFO catchers, the grabber runs on a timer, so it’s imperative you spot your target early and get into a good position before time runs out. Different labs offer varying kinds of machines, with some introducing dexterity-testing features like a moving base that carries the critters away, or a plexiglass fence that makes it more difficult to drop the animals inside. Where the platforming levels and basic puzzles could feel overfamiliar at times, Bearly Escape's well-balanced crane games consistently hit the sweet spot between frustrating and moreish, and kept me eager to push on.

Saving the same kinds of animals in a row unlocks tools that are essential to the platforming portion. For example, first aid kits will mend any injuries you’ve picked up while working through the undergrowth. These items are also key to freeing the animals trapped in the wild, as different traps require different tools. Say a Shiba Inu is trapped in a box, you’ll need a hammer to bash open the slats, or if a panda is strung up in a tree, a boomerang can cut them down.

Unfortunately, Bearly Escape doesn’t let you solve these problems yourself with physical interactions, which is a shame. Your input is instead limited to pressing X when your bear proxy is nearby, and the game automatically dictates what the essential tool is. While it would be preferable to solve each aspect of the animal-freeing puzzles, the diversity of tools available does add depth to the platforming levels and helps weave together these different mechanics.

This isn’t a seamless experience, which isn't entirely surprising for an Early Access game. While not every platforming level or first-person puzzle I tried is a winner, Bearly Escape's claw machine minigame feels like an appropriately frustrating and wonderfully accurate recreation of real-world arcade machines.

Bearly Escape is available now in Early Access on Quest and Steam.