STUFFED was easily one of our favourite new IPs on display at EGX
- Developer: Waving Bear Studio
- Publisher: Waving Bear Studio
- Genre: FPS, Indie, Casual
- Platform: Windows PC
- Release date: TBD (est. Q4 2021/Q1 2022)
- Price: £9.99 (est MSRP)
Get STUFFED
In STUFFED you play as Ellie’s beloved Teddy Bear, tasked by her Dad to protect her as she sleeps. In Ellie’s nightmares, her toys come to life, and it’s your job to keep waves of enemies away from her bedroom door at any cost.
In terms of gameplay, STUFFED is best described as a family-friendly version of CoD Zombies, except instead of zombies you’ll be facing off against toy robots, inflatable sharks that swim through the floor, rubber ducks, garden gnomes, shadowy apparitions and much more. It could still be scary for very young gamers, as it gets quite intense and the rubber ducks have pretty sharp teeth, but there’s no blood or gore.
Replacing the typical guns and knives, you’ll have a variety of ingenious weaponry bodged together from various household items. Dual-wielded revolvers crafted from rock’em sock’em robots, automatic rifles with spinning foosball players as the firing mechanism, a caulking gun modified into a firearm with a bolt cable-tied on as a sight, a rolled-up magazine held together with elastic bands with bobby pins for aiming and an LMG that blasts crayons are just a few of the wildly inventive weapons at your disposal.
I was chatting with the team about these, and they joked about how they had in-depth arguments about the plausibility of these weapons – I can totally relate, as we had a similar conversation after the event, too. I even went around my kids’ bedrooms to see what I would use were I a teddy bear looking to jerry-rig something together. So far I have multi-barrel high-explosive party poppers, a marble-launching hairband catapult, a deodorant can jetpack, caltrops made from Jacks, and a superglue squirting contraption in my imaginary arsenal. It’s a fun discussion to have after a few beers!
These weapons will be complemented by various perks and power-ups, too. Damage modifiers, infinite sprint, enhanced movement speed and much more will be unlockable as you advance through the waves.
Build-a-bear
There will be personalisation a-plenty for your teddy bear, with different types and colours of fur available and a whole selection of outfits to dress them up in.
As you play, you’ll also earn points that can be spent on upgrading, purchasing or reloading weapons, and also unlock further parts of the house. It’s very similar to CoD Zombies in this regard, which the developers openly acknowledge as their primary inspiration. Importantly, it doesn’t just feel like a clone.
Because the gameplay takes place within Ellie’s dreams, it’s given the developers a bit of free rein in this regard. With a relatively small play area, it would be easy for STUFFED to become repetitive after a while, but Waving Bear Studio has neatly side-stepped this potential pitfall by making the play zone procedurally generated. You’ll be dashing around hallways, kitchens, the garden and even going deeper into Ellie’s dreamworld as you fight to protect your owner. Each playthrough will have a different layout, and the events that take place are unscripted, which should keep STUFFED feeling fresh with every go.
What they have also nailed, based on my hands-on time at EGX, is the super-fluid gameplay and smooth graphics. Tearing around the house, collecting weapons and fending off boss nightmares feels really good, even in this beta phase of development.
Throw in couch co-op and four-player online support and STUFFED is shaping up to be a great casual game to throw on with friends or your family. The best part? Waving Bear Studio is targeting a £9.99 price point, which feels like an absolute steal considering how polished STUFFED is shaping up to be.
STUFFED is expected to be released in 2022 for Windows PC (Steam), however, they are also considering releasing on consoles, too (do it!)
- Website – www.wavingbearstudio.com
- Steam Store Page – https://store.steampowered.com/app/1243200/STUFFED/
- Trailer – https://bit.ly/StuffedBetaTrailer
- Facebook – www.facebook.com/gamestuffed
- Twitter – www.twitter.com/thewavingbears
- Instagram – www.instagram.com/wavingbearstudio
- Discord – https://discord.gg/6xHWHq5B2K
