When we first saw the character model of the ‘hero’ in Naughty Bear and were told that, yes, this game where you play as a murderous cuddly bear is actually coming out, we responded with a confused ‘huh?’. This is coming out in shops. On a disc. And it’ll be playable. A BEAR!

Naughty Bear is from the inconsistent French developer A2M, responsible for last year’s okay-in-short-bursts Wet and the bloody poor Indiana Jones And The Staff Of Kings, only released on low-tech consoles. As fascinating as the premise is – a bear isn’t invited to a birthday party, so he resorts to physical and mental harassment in the hunt for revenge – we can’t help but feel that there’s an air of anthropomorphic novelty to the whole idea. We don’t think that will necessarily result in a good game. In a way, we feel the same way we did about the ‘chimp in the White House’ ridiculousness that was Hail To The Chimp – funny animal, questionable idea for a videogame.

Still, the screenshots are sort of funny. The titular bear, actually named Naughty Bear, really isn’t happy when he’s denied an invitation to the birthday party, resulting in him stabbing, shooting and decapitating his former buddies in retribution. Players will apparently earn ‘scare’ points for using the most unsavoury forms of torture against the other animals, with the points becoming harder to accumulate as the game progresses and the bears are a little steelier towards their cuddly colleague.

The first footage revealed is bizarre, told in an almost kid’s TV-like style, with a narrator innocently speaking of the dark feelings that lie within this troubled soft toy. Naughty Bear is set on the ‘Island of Perfection’, a utopia, of sorts, for all these adorable animals – we’re not expecting some commentary on the dangers of social paradise. We’re not expecting BioShock.