While there are plenty of Metroidvania platformers out there, not many of them actually go for more of a Zelda II style. Finding Teddy 2 is such a game. While the game is a fun little action-platformer with a few neat ideas, it falls somewhat short because of two large oversights in its gameplay.

Finding Teddy 2 is the sequel to Finding Teddy, which was actually a point and click adventure game. This time, the game has made a genre switch to action-platformer. Most of the game’s story is told through visuals, leaving everything in-between to the player’s imagination. The game starts when Tara gets done playing a videogame session that ended abruptly. Curious to find out what happened, she heads outside. And for whatever reason, she takes a sword and starts off toward a castle, whereupon her teddy bear is kidnapped by a goblin-like mage monster. With some exploration, Tara finds a magic book, and gets sucked into its world. In these various worlds, you will find cubes that let you play melodies. These melodies will be the main source of communicating with the local lifeforms that can speak only in song. They are also used to find secrets or open doors. Each world also has a dungeon to explore, with new items that help aid your progress through the game, and get to previously inaccessible areas. While that’s par the course for the genre, the use of the cubes reminds me of the Ocarina of Time.

The game feels a lot more like Zelda II though, for better or worse. Tara has a sword for melee combat, and can even downward/upward thrust like Link can. Combat is a bit wonky however. The reach of Tara’s sword is actually more a knife’s, pitifully short. She does have a shield, which means the time to strike is after a melee attack is blocked. You could do downward thrusts, but it’s not always the best option, lest you take damage afterward if the enemy is still standing. Running attacks give you a larger reach, but getting the timing down is hard. Most enemies need to be dealt with slowly and methodically and health recovery is also difficult. The penalty for saying is pretty annoying too, as you get sent back to the beginning of the area you are in. The rule of thumb in this game is too save early, and save often. To help you, Tara can use marbles to buy things in the Castle’s shop. Interestingly enough, the Overall upgrades only determine how much health you get back from pickups, rather than increased defense.

One big issue the lack of a map screen “black cloud” of where you have not explored. This is a baffling design oversight that makes it hard to tell the player what they might be missing. Instead you might wander aimlessly for minutes before stumbling on the solution. There’s also no way to change the resolution, so playing in windowed mode means playing in a tiny screen. While this could all change in future updates, it boggles my mind that it wasn’t thought of. While these are a bit annoying issues to contend with, there’s a fun little game in there, but it might have needed a bit more time in the oven.

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