geodesic

None of that helped. Some of the design errors: - The bear needs to be as far away as possible when you reach for the spear. But you have no control over it. All you can do is hope its random pathing takes it away. This can take ages, and you can't even see properly. A simple "throw rock to distract it" would've fixed it. - The "safe zones" are not clearly delineated, and their gameplay extent doesn't match the surroundings. When trying to peek outside, the bear can see you through rocks and charge when you can't even see it. In other cases, you can rub your bare ass in its face and yet it can't claw at you. Wut. - The AI is transparently dumb. The bear goes from "charge" to "panic" mode when you enter a safe zone, causing it to yelp for no reason, which destroys suspension of disbelief and is in no way realistic behavior. If it's supposed to be menacing, how about having it try claw at you regardless. - The way to kill the bear is to stab it 3 times. With the spear that failed to do any damage previously. At this point in the game, I had already stabbed it 5 times by the radio towers. So how am I supposed to know that this time, it is going to work? Oh but if I give a wolf a tiny nick with a rusty knife, it'll bleed out guaranteed. Good luck figuring out this logic, when the punishment for getting it wrong is to watch the same unskippable death sequence over and over and over again. - No manual save even though you will complete the exact same sneaking path the first dozen times trying to get to the damn spear, and the sneaking is glacial. Hinterland has designed a great sandbox and then keeps finding reasons to not trust its players with it. If the cave segment required them to take away all your stuff and disable the passing of time, maybe that should've been a hint that this does not belong in the game. Let people tell their own stories, instead of the embarrassingly forced attempts at drama and characterization. Mackenzie is somehow the world's biggest doormat but also a tough survivor? And even when his ex-wife nearly gets him killed, after she refuses to tell him even one word, he's still too honor bound (read: moronic) not to try and brute force a 3 digit number lock? And neither does the bad guy at the end of ep2? In a game where you crack bank safes by ear as a gameplay mechanic? Seriously wat. This is how they attempted to fix Wintermute eps 1 and 2. Fucking Canadians man. They confuse stupid for nice.

Signed up just to say: this entire segment is ridiculous, and the spear mechanic is tedious af (and too slow, and drains stamina too fast). As is the inability to just skip the bear fight and reload, because that's what you're going to do 99.9999% of the time. It's not scary or tense, it's just badly designed.