Enviro-Bear 2010 for iOS

Enviro-Bear 2010 is part game, part joke, part art piece, and part game design experiment, a bold and ridiculous app that's basically a Rorschach test for gamers, in which you play a bear driving a car who's trying to run over and then scarf up enough food to hibernate in the last 5 minutes before winter.

Whether you love or hate Enviro-Bear 2010, a few things are certain: the interface is deliberately difficult (reflecting, one might suppose, the difficulty a real bear would experience driving a car), as you touch and drag to direct the bear's paw to steer, press the gas and brake, shift between forward and reverse, and interact with anything that comes crashing in through your windshield--from fish and berries to rocks, badgers, leaves, and bees. The graphics and sound are jarringly retro and demented, with lots of funny touches, like the bloodshot eyes when your frustrated bear avatar roars.

There is some actual gameplay at the heart of Enviro-Bear 2010, with a surprising amount of interaction and some limited puzzle-solving in the otherwise absurd environment (populated, it should be noted, by other bears driving cars, which hopefully foreshadows a networked, online version of Enviro-Bear 2010), and the game's awkward controls can actually make the successful completion of each level even more satisfying. Overall, Enviro-Bear 2010 is clearly an inspired--or insane, depending on your perspective--app, and fans of the so-bad-it's-good sub-subgenre will get a lot of enjoyment for the price.