Teddy Floppy Ear: Mountain Adventure

The Good
Compared to "Teddy Floppy Ear: Kayaking", this game is a little larger. It also feels, in a way, less linear - even though it is in fact highly linear (which is probably a good idea in games for children), it consists of different sub-tasks. The game opens up gradually, in a not entirely realistic way - new exits from a screen will be shown only when it's time to use them. (For example, there is a screen where two trekking paths meet. It has three exits, which at once seems obvious from the layout if the paths... but the exit to the right will only be open after Teddy Floppy Ear gets to the nature reserve in a different way and then comes back using this road.
The graphics look beautiful and are true to the puppet animation style known from the TV version of "Teddy Floppy Ear". As usual, minigames have slightly different graphic styles. There are several of them and while they are obviously easy for an adult player, they are still nice. A "particularly high concentration of minigames" is found in the clearing where Teddy's uncle is painting. All of these minigames have something to do with visual arts: spotting differences (you only have to spot five, but there are more to make the sequence easier), mixing colours, recognising shapes and so on. There are also a few other minigames: sorting garbage (a very nice and educational one, though I would argue with a toothbrush being categorised as "plastic" - everybody treats a used toothbrush as a not very hygienic item which should be just thrown away...), catching black and white musical notes while avoiding catching other colors, getting climbing gear back from marmots while avoiding other items and the game with the singing sheep (you have to click a sheep with the bell in the right color when its note is on the lighter part of the musical stave) - admittedly the most "difficult" one, it's not hard to miss clicking in the right moment.
If I had to choose one screenshot I liked best, it would be the map. And another interesting aspect is that this map changes. The main task Teddy has to perform is to take pictures of five animals and five rare flowers. After he takes the pictures, miniatures of these animals and plants appear on the map. If you fail to notice a flower you could photograph, a little red icon of a camera will appear in that place.
Voice acting, at least in the Polish version, sounds nice. I particularly liked a nervous bat, a chamois lamb which behaves like a bridge troll, and a lynx shepherd who is speaking the dialect of the Polish Tatra mountains. Though, having an educational background in literature and linguistics, including some knowledge of dialectology, I have to say that it's not entirely accurate. For interested readers: in modern Polish the letter "ż" and the digraph "rz" are pronounced the same, like "j" in the French word "jalousie" or like "sh" when the sound is devoiced, but spelled differently due to generally rather conservative spelling and because thus spelling hints to etymology. "Rz" was originally pronounced like a soft "r" - and some Polish dialects still keep a phonetic distinction between "rz" and "ż". The latter is pronounced as "z" in the Tatra dialect, but the former isn't - pronouncing it as "z" is a common mistake when imitating Tatra dialect. However, it nicely keeps some other characteristics such as the initial accent.
Plus, being a big cat lover since early childhood (though, as I already wrote in the screenshot captions, it would be hard to call a lynx a "big cat" - lynxes are about three times the size of a domestic cat, while tigers can weigh even over 600 pounds and even the smallest big cats, leopards, are much bigger than lynxes), I just liked the fact that this shepherd is a lynx... :) In Poland the Eurasian lynx is a rare and vulnerable species, in the Tatra mountains it's very hard to find.

The Bad
There's one more part which could be called a minigame: Teddy painting his own picture for the shepherd. I couldn't help comparing it to "colouring books" in some Humongous Entertainment games ("Putt-Putt and Fatty Bear's Activity Pack", the "Let's Explore" series). Of course, colouring and painting your own picture are two different things. In the painting minigame you have two different paintbrushes (a narrower and thicker one) and two different crayons (plus an eraser), and you can change the colors of each one. However, the colour palette is very small. If I remember well, just red, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, orange and white. The Humongous Entertainment games offered huge possibilities in mixing colours and achieving different shades. Here - there's not even any brown, black or gray (although the paper used for painting is rather light gray that white). Quite a pity...
By the way, since I mentioned Humongous Entertainment: the classic SCUMM engine worked much more smoothly than whatever engine is used in the Teddy Floppy Ear games. Each new screen takes a little while to load - really just a little, but anyway it's not as smooth. Of course there are many different game engines, but I just don't believe that large, "heavy" modern games must load gradually if games from the 1990s - developed in times of much slower computers - often worked better.
The game includes one serious oversight: the game has Polish version... but the intro and ending don't! Again, this is just unprofessional... I generally have no idea why the Teddy Floppy Ear games - with a character much more known in Poland than abroad (it seems that the series is still being shown in some countries, for example Finland, but unless I'm mistaken, it was never aired in the UK) - seem to be mostly made for a foreign audience. Perhaps this could secure a bit of financing from the Adam Mickiewicz Institute because it counts as "promoting Polish culture abroad"... Anyway, lack of a Polish intro sounds just weird and stupid - come one, is it so hard to remember to record voice for this part? And it's really short and only has one character - Teddy Floppy Ear himself - speaking.
I regret that the game - similar to "Kayaking" and "The Race" - is only available on Steam. Finally I gave in and installed it. But I still don't particularly like it because for me there's something fundamentally wrong with Steam's business model - where even after you pay for a game, you don't own it. As someone pointed out, if you were to disagree with a new version of Steam's terms of service, the only option they would leave you is to uninstall Steam and lose access to games you had already bought... This is deeply unfair and I don't think that it should be promoted.

The Bottom Line
"Mountain Adventure" is a nice children's game - colorful, educational and fun to play. For me it seems much better than "Kayaking" - unsurprisingly, given the way in which at least the PC version of "Kayaking" - a decent game in other aspects - was ruined with the terrible kayak steering, which caused it to get stuck repeatedly... However, let's put a few things in perspective together. The steering in "Kayaking", which in principle creates the impression that the game wasn't even properly tested. The difficulty level in "The Race", which was criticised as greatly exaggerated in a children's game. And the small, but rather idiotic oversight in "Mountain Adventure" - unfinished translation, with Polish intro and ending just missing. Taken together, these things unfortunately don't create a good image of Forever Entertainment...