The simulator genre has certainly offered up some peculiar ideas over years. There’s the ever popular Rollercoaster Tycoon, which mixes dizzying theme park rides with budget management and landscaping and there’s the far more mundane example of Train Simulator, which provides players with a chance to take on the world’s greatest railways, and even Surgeon Simulator. There’s also everything in between, with creators wanting to simulate what we see on a daily basis with none of the risk from trying it out in real life and giving up when players burn down the house and have a hygiene rating too low to call the fire brigade (The Sims).

With tongue so far in cheek it would have to be surgically removed is Goat Simulator, where players control the titular goat as they wreck mayhem (and murder) for points. This seems to be the inspiration for Bear Simulator which too wants to put the control of a wild animal in player hands. Looking for funding on Kickstarter, where it sits just a few thousand dollars from its $29,500 funding goal, Bear Simulator avoids typical picnic-terrorizing hijinks, going for a pseudo-realism route instead, as players will be able to “do bear things which include exploring, eating fish and plants, striking down anything that dare stand before your might, increasing your stats, sleeping and discovering mysteries of your forest home”.

Also on the agenda for the FPB (First-Person Bear) title is a melee fighting system and a multi-environment world “with lots to see and discover,” and presumably, ravage with a sharply clawed bear paw. This is all in the aid of fighting “against the tyranny,” - with the tyranny being the fact that the majority of games don’t let players control bears, (save for Banjo-Kazooie and EnviroBear which Bear Simulator’s Kickstarter cites as examples).

While Bear Simulator may seem like a “dumb idea” or even a “really dumb idea” (how the game’s creator describes the thinking behind Bear Simulator), the fact that it is also being described as “mini Skyrim but you're a bear” suggests that Farjay Studios, the one-man team behind the game, is taking this a little more seriously than he’d like us to think. Should the Skyrim-esque game reach its goal, Farjay is also looking to add mountain goats to the title, perhaps in  a nod to its fellow humorous simulation cohort or as a subtle taunt to see which can be the better wild animal sim, but we’ll be able to choose a side in the bear vs goat debate later this year in November, 2014, when Bear Simulator is hoping to be released on Steam.

Source: Bear Simulator’s Kickstarter