When a little girl's teddy bear is taken by a monster in her wardrobe, she gives chase, only to find herself in a strange and magical world. She must explore the land in order to reclaim Teddy, but even if she finds him, will she then be able to return back home?
A sequel called Finding Teddy II was released for PC on April 1st, 2015, but it was renamed Chronicles of Teddy: Harmony of Exidus when ported to PS4 and Wii U in March 2016. It is notable for undergoing a significant Genre Shift, turning from an adventure game with no way to attack to a Metroidvania where the slightly older protagonist now slays plenty of monsters and bosses with her sword and shield.
Tropes present in Finding Teddy:
- Animal Mecha: There is a huge robotic bee guarding a flower. Trying to pluck it off regardless will quickly see it impale the girl with its stinger.
- Anti-Frustration Features: Not doing anything for a while will result in the game automatically highlighting all of the objects of interest on the current screen, as well as the entry[/exit points.
- Bloodless Carnage: In spite of the seemingly cutesy name, these adventure games are closer to the 90s classics when it comes to the various ways in which the little protagonist can die.
- Cerebus Syndrome: The game starts off bright and cheerful, but it gets progressively darker as the girl gets closer to the giant spider's lair.
- Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: There are plenty of ways to get killed, but they barely set the player back.
- Deliberately Monochrome: The little girl is drawn in this manner with a white skin, dark hair and a grey dress, in sharp contrast to the colorful backgrounds all around her. The two companions she meets (a fly and a cat) are also fully black-and-white.
- Giant Spider: A truly huge one kickstarts the plot by kidnapping teddy: we only see its leg in the intro, which is large enough to reach from the wardrobe to her bed on the other side of the room, and pluck off the teddy bear. The goal of the game is thus to reach its lair to rescue teddy.
- On the beach level, there's a huge web in the corner. Touching it immediately alerts a somewhat smaller (and weirdly six-legged) spider: it is still larger than the girl and immediately grabs her, wrapping her in a cocoon in mere seconds.
- Heroic Mime: The little girl you play as will never utter a word. Then again, neither will anyone or anything else in the game.
- Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Tearing off a flower you are not supposed to will first knock the girl over due to how heavy it was, and then see a huge, seemingly immobile robotic bee suddenly spring to life and completely skewer her on its metal stinger.
- Magic Music: Many of the puzzles are about creating music from some unusual sources in the environment in order to generate some spell. One puzzle, for instance, has you click on the five multi-coloured frogs, with each having a note assigned to it. Once you do it in the correct order, they'll vacate the branch they were sitting on, and let you cross the river by walking on it.
- The Many Deaths of You: As with the classic adventure games of times past, it seems like everything in Exidus has it in for the little girl and each of the eights monsters has its own unique animation (and Steam achievement) for killing you.
Tropes present in Chronicles of Teddy:
- Action Girl: The protagonist, in sharp contrast to the original game.
- Actionised Sequel: The protagonist goes from being completely helpless in a fight and relying on her wits and companions to advance, to easily jumping and slashing her way through the levels.
- Attack Its Weak Point:
- Tara, the plant boss, is defeated through hitting three weak points - a spike-generating crystal in the front, its crystal tail in the back, and then its eye, and then doing this cycle two more times.
- To finish off Harao, the snake boss, you have to damage it until it starts to come up through the centre of the cross-shaped room you fight it in and wait, then leap down and drive your sword into its eye.
- Super Anguis can only be killed through striking at the ruby in its forehead.
- Background Boss: Super Anguis is so enormous that he almost completely takes up the background. He only ever attacks with his two giant fists in this form, which also appear to be completely disconnected from any actual arms.
- Blob Monster: Slimes are one of the enemy types in this game, coming in a number of different varieties (plain, electric, flaming, poisonous, electric etc).
- Continuing is Painful: You can always retry from the last checkpoint, but dying will make you lose half your money.
- Defeat Equals Explosion: Every boss blows up in a huge explosion of light once defeated, leaving only a ton of the game's multicoloured currency behind.
- Die, Chair, Die!: There are often vases to break, in order to find the game's currency inside them.
- Energy Ball:
- Hazaura is a boss who casts large homing purple orbs from her staff.
- The Final Boss, Anguis, can casts similar orbs, which are smaller, but also faster to deploy. He only creates a few in his first phase, but will generate dozens of them in a line across the screen, during his second phase, which will reshuffle, then all come down at once and damage the girl, unless the player managed to position her in one of the gaps formed when the orbs reshuffle.
- His third phase will have him generate a vortex between his raised hands while he's hovering high in the center of the room, and send out a bunch of orbs that will either immediately rain down diagonally, or gets suspended in mid-air, and then home down on the player one by one. Alternatively, he can generate that vortex, and then immediately toss it into the water beneath the stage, which will bubble up and then arise in tentacles trying to hit the player.
- Evil Laugh: The Final Boss, Anguis, has one, though unlike most examples, it's barely intimidating and mostly just conveys his contempt for you. During his Boss Battle, he'll deliver one every time you take damage.
- Evil Sorceror: Anguis, the Big Bad, wears a wizard's hood and fights with magic. He's also an evil tyrant who usurped the throne from your friend Tarant, with an Evil Laugh to boot.
- Gamer Chick: The game opens with our protagonist playing a game on the TV in her room... then a power outage happens, prompting her to get up and investigate. Bonus points for having a Zelda II: The Adventure of Link poster on the wall.
- "Get Back Here!" Boss: Anguis spends most of his time hovering at the top of the room, outside of your attack range. You can only hurt him during the brief periods when he floats down, which can lead to you chasing after him a lot. This gets easier in his later phases, where he has an attack that is guaranteed to bring him into sword range.
- Goomba Stomp: Jumping onto the enemies can also damage them. The worm boss, Harao, outright needs to get stomped at during some points of its battle.
- Knightly Sword and Shield:
- Several enemies have the same equipment, allowing them to block and parry your attacks similarly to the Iron Knuckles from Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.
- Lizard warrior Raizara also wields a sword and a shield, though its sword is absolutely massive even when taking its increased size into account.
- Large and in Charge: It's not apparent until you fight him in combat, but The Usurper Anguis is enormous. Even with the camera zoomed out enough to reduce the protagonist to the size of an ant, he looks huge and is several times her height.
- Little Miss Badass: Her age doesn’t stop the protagonist from slaying mermaids, plant monstrosities, giant lizard warriors, usurper wizard kings and more in this game.
- Lizard Folk: In addition to Anguis, several regular enemies are lizard warriors, with stronger draconic variants. One of the bosses is a large humanoid lizard with a sword and shield, named Raizara.
- Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: The shield will successfully block physical attacks, provided they come from the front and at the right height. Sometimes, attacks will come from the low and crouching with the shield at the ready is necessary in order to block them.
- Money Spider: The enemies burst into marbles, the game's currency, upon defeat. Interestingly, the protagonist appears to be one of these as well; her death animation shows her exploding into marbles just like enemies.
- One-Winged Angel: As expected, the Final Boss, Anguis, turns into Super Anguis when you defeat his third phase. This form is an absolutely giant Background Boss.
- Palette Swap: Many of the enemies are reskins of each other.
- Power Floats: Evil Sorceror Anguis is constantly floating, complete with Midair Bobbing.
- Puzzle Boss: All of them to some degree, as expected of a game inspired by The Legend of Zelda. Tara and Harao are the biggest examples, as they require using not just your tools but also the spells you learned earlier in the dungeon.
- Sequential Boss: The Final Boss, Anguis, has three phases. And that is before he evolves into Super Anguis for one final phase.
- Shield-Bearing Mook: Some enemies wield shields, and much like the player, they also know how to crouch to block attacks from the low.
- Shout-Out:
- The protagonist has a Zelda II: The Adventure of Link poster in her room, referencing one of the gameplay inspirations for the game.
- Also to Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, Stone and Ruby Knights are similar in both appearance and behavior to that game's Iron Knuckles, copying their infamously tricky mechanic of adjusting their own shield to block your attacks. Referring to dungeons as "palaces" is another likely reference.
- The protagonist also has action figures of Super Saiyan Goku and Vegeta on a shelf near said poster.
- Spike Shooter: Tara is a plant boss that starts the battle through shooting out a series of spikes. A regular enemy also has this ability, shooting spikes at two different heights that must be blocked with carefully timed ducking.
- Tactical Suicide Boss:
- Raizara only exposes himself to attack when he tries to swing his sword, dropping his shield in the process. If he just stuck to his other attacks, the protagonist would never defeat him.
- Anguis is a flying, spell-casting boss, while the player never gets ranged attacks. He would have been invulnerable if he stayed hovering up high during his second phase and casting his multi-orb attack, but he just can't resist the temptation to generate an energy spear thing and try to slam it into the protagonist, in a move that is easily dodged and just leaves him exposed on the ground. His third phase has even more magical attacks done from a height, yet he still insists on hovering down into your melee range.
- This becomes even more egregious during the Super Anguis fight. He has two large hands, and seemingly the only thing he needs to do is to slam them into the ground until he eventually wins through attrition, as his scales are completely impenetrable to the player's sword. Yet, he sometimes chooses to keep both his palms flat right beneath his face for absolutely no reason, which serves no purpose besides allowing the player to wall-jump between the palms and reach the ruby in his forehead that acts as his only weak spot.
- The Usurper: The plot is kicked off by Evil Sorceror Anguis killing Tarant, the king from the previous game, and usurping his throne. Tarant's spirit implores you to defeat him and save the kingdom from his tyranny.
- Wake-Up Call Boss: Harao; Hazaura is a relatively easy opponent where all you have to do is dodge her projectile attacks and hit her until she dies, while Tara is a Puzzle Boss which is quite easy as long as you can work out how to get the claws to retract from its eye. Harao, on the other hand, combines the puzzle mechanics of Tara (having to use the Musicom in battle) with more precise timing, a cramped and difficult-to-navigate boss arena, and some of the game's more frustrating mechanics — namely the absurdly short Mercy Invincibility, which means if you screw up and Harao crawls over you, it'll continue hitting you every second the instant your invincibility wears off without giving you an opportunity to get out of its corridor-filling body, so almost every time you get hit, you're going to lose at least 1/4 to 1/3 of your HP. Its random movements and the timed bombs it leaves lying around as it moves make matters even worse.
