Playing Every Game in the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality
PEGBRJE: ‘Fat Bear Week’ and ‘ThrustMe’
The last full page of the bundle starts now.
Fat Bear Week is a quirky game created by TeamFatBears, a collective of then-students in the USA. Our story follows bears getting ready for their upcoming hibernation by eating their fill of food and becoming so large they roll around uncontrollably.
Hang on, haven’t we done this before?
Yes, but no. Back on page 45 of the bundle there was a game called Bear-ly There, a physics game that involved a bear preparing for hibernation. There’s even a comment highlighting the coincidence that Fat Bear Week came out after it and both exist in the bundle. So where do they differ, and what is the same?
Gameplay wise, Fat Bear Week has the player control the bear to collect as much food before the timer at the top runs out, indicating hibernation. They start bear-shaped, but as they eat more food they will become a ball of mass that rolls around the map instead. This is where the physics kicks in and where it is most similar to Bear-ly There as our chosen bear tries their best to keep control of the sphere of fur and fat.
This size does have its advantages, however, as each level contains breakable objects that reveal hidden areas. They can only be broken if the bear is heavy enough, which means finding the food and coming back to dish out vengeance on that tree or stone.
The major difference is in how Fat Bear Week scores the player and the framing of each playthrough. The game is split in to three levels, and points are accumulated in a three-star tier system; achieve enough food to get tier one, and so on.
This frames it less as a game about survival with physics and more about who can achieve the highest score, reinforced by the bears unlocked by achieving certain milestones. It’s a clever way to avoid frustration and panic, knowing that there’s always another go if things go south.
Fat Bear Week is a silly game, much like it’s predecessor in the bundle, making it hard to separate the two. However they both bring different aesthetics and gameplay feel to them. Fat Bear Week is all about achieving the highest possible score and finding new unlockables hidden in the environment.
As with the previous game, if you want something silly to take the edge off, this is it.
ThrustMe is an arcade puzzle adventure created by petskull, an indie dev and IT developer in Denmark. As a pilot of a lunar lander module, it is up to the player to rescue the astronauts across different planets that have wandered in to places unknown and will soon run out of oxygen.
With only a single thruster on this module, players will navigate the rocky sub-terrain of different planets while searching for astronauts to bring back to the base. Since the thruster has one output strength, the majority of the game’s movement revolves around using gravity and physics to rotate around corners and conserve fuel to make long voyages.
The astronauts in question have limited oxygen, so while players need to worry about their fuel they are also in a constant battle against time to ensure that they don’t lose the astronauts to suffocation. Of course, that is if the player doesn’t accidentally land on top of them and crush them.
Yes it happened to me.
Each level starts by showing the layout before letting the player explore and follow the blue arrow to find the nearest astronaut. Run in to a wall at high speeds and the shields will get damaged; take too much damage and the module explodes, losing a ship and forcing a restart from the top of the level.
Since there is already the time requirement from the oxygen and fuel, this adds even more pressure on the player to ensure that each dive attempt is as clean and efficient as possible, which heightens the risk of it going completely wrong.
Reminiscent of old FLASH games I played throughout my childhood, ThrustMe is a fun little game that you can lose yourself in. Every level becomes that much harder than the last, especially since the walls can get quite bouncy at times making landings and narrow passages nigh impossible to speed through. However if you can strike a balance and keep yourself cool, you will cover all 100 levels and rescue those poor spacefarers. Good luck!
