Finding Teddy 2 is a cute and charming game that blends Zelda 2’s combat with an almost Super Metroid atmosphere. Its a MetroidVania style game that for the past 17+ hours I’ve struggled to find anything to say about it other than wow is it good and boy am I having fun! Well getting something to talk about is usually a bad thing. No one is happy unless they have something to complain about. If the game wasn’t so good and fun, I would have walked away after four hours and not stuck around for 17+
I will call this monstrosity of a level the triangle room. The object isn’t just to make it to the exit, its to hear a combination from the character next to the exit. This room is only one of four and its by far the most difficult. I call it a room, because in MetroidVania, everything inside is a room or a hallway, but this room feels more like a level.
You start out and everything is perfectly fine. The level design has been thrown overboard for these four rooms. The game goes from a logical, believable sort of level design to some crazy fan made spike filled level design. Its not enough this level is full of thorny plants, but there are eyeballs that drop fire down. That’s the least of your worries.
Fun platforming turns into precision platforming over pits. These aren’t death pits mind you, Finding Teddy 2 is forgiving and each pit merely means a loss of health and a respawn where you were last standing. As the level amps up the challenge, it first offers a long jump into a wall where you then slide down to two platforms at the bottom of the screen. That’s fine, but then there are crawlers attached to these two platforms and the crawlers will dive beneath the screen under the platform and come up afterword. That’s bearable.
It gets worse from there, you’re stuck under thrones, barely able to jump up the steps you’re presented with, but then there are simple slimes. Every game like this has some sort of mediocre slime enemy, but since this is Finding Teddy 2, there are a variety of slimes, including electrical slimes that will protect themselves from your sword with an electrical charge if you stab them. Its genius and I always avoid them instead of fighting them, but in this case you’re forced to fight them. The only problem is you’re stuck under thrones, jumping will hurt you and you won’t swing your sword when you’re hurt. You’re forced to stay there, waiting for the moment when these electro slimes jump in the air so you can up thrust them to death. Unless you’re lucky enough to have them off the edge of the step where you only have to jump up and stab them.
From there, the level turns into precision jumps through thorns, but over solid ground, that is before the ground opens up into the pits. I’ve already explained that, but it gets worse from there. What could be worse? Even in your wildest imagination, you couldn’t come up with what’s next. No in some sadistic level designer’s mind they presented what I call undead black eruption turtles. The only way to kill them is to stab their glowing tail. That’s fine, but if you were to stab their tail, that’s not why they’re here.
These turtles are trapped on platforms so small they can’t move. They are part of the platform. You’ll need to double angel jump to them, down thrust into them and bounce off. I don’t just mean down thrust anywhere, you’ll need to be precise and hit them at the furthest part of their shell to be aimed in the right direction to bounce over a giant gap.
Oh and I call them eruption turtles because they erupt projectiles that spew randomly from their shell. If they hit you, it’ll break your down thrust and you might fall in a pit, unless you get lucky enough to land on the platform with the turtle where you’ll come out of invulnerability and get hit by the turtle, sending you into the pit.
Its never just one challenge, the first one is so you can test your skill, the second one is there for you to know you’ve got it down. The third one is there to mess it all up. The distance is too far for you to bounce off and these bounces send you pretty far. Its just enough to make me think I can do it, but I never can, instead I need to jump, hit a projectile before landing so I become invulnerable for a split second enough to land on the platform being shared by the turtle, then take damage to become invulnerable again, before jumping and then angel jumping in the air to make it over the gap.
That’s just the third, then the fourth and fifth come as a pair. Two turtles that randomly erupt and you need to bounce off of both. Timing isn’t the issue, its luck. Being lucky enough to make it past both without one of their eruptions sending you into the pit. I managed to glitch my way through the same as I did with the third turtle.
The game always has plenty of pots full of health for each one of your crazy feats. It wants you to keep playing on this, the most difficult level in the entire game.
Then, because that’s a feat that you can still get yourself through, then there’s the impossible jump. In Finding Teddy you have a double jump that I call the angel jump, because on the second jump, you transform into one of the heavenly to get an extra boost. There’s no hover afterward, its just a double jump. This leap of faith is far too long for the angel jump, but there’s the character standing right there just out of reach. Willing to tell you the secret combination.
Instead, you’re standing over top of six or so projectile slimes. These slimes shoot rocks that go forever. Like everything else, there is no pattern its random. So to get to the other side, you’ll need to angel jump across this gap and down thrust not just one rock, but two on your way across. This feels like skill mixed with luck, but it also seems needlessly difficult, if not impossible. You also need to hope and pray that you don’t accidentally tap down twice, because there’s an ability that darts you straight down instead of doing just a normal down thrust.
With all that being said, how difficult could the triangle combination be?
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