Bem Feito is one of those games that the less you know about it, the better your experience will be. But I still need to write a review about it, I cannot just write a single phrase and get away with it. So, without spoilers, let's talk about this mysterious small game that, although it has a lot of qualities, maybe promised too much and couldn't get me that excited for the whole ride.

This title is actually an "expanded port" of a game called Bem Feito, supposedly launched in 1999 by Brazilian company MEGASOFT as the only title of its portable gaming device, the Jogaroto (yes, this is fictional, but let's roll with it). You follow Reginaldo, a little boy living in a little planet, doing his chores and meeting some new friends. During each day in the game, you have a list of tasks to do, and this includes exploring the place and making some choices to progress the story.

At this point, you can imagine there's more than meet the eye in this little old ROM to discover (or you just read the content warning in the Steam page). All I can say is that the process of finding this new layer behind the life simulation game was really interesting and compelling, that glued me and my wife for 2 hours at the TV just trying to see how the story would unfold. The way the controls work could be a little better too, but nothing you can't learn with some simple trial and error.

Visually, Bem Feito also does its job really well. It's great how the game uses a monochromatic palette to invoke a Game Boy-like retro style, but the purple tint and the perspective camera make it a strange (but totally intentional) uncanny valley, where you know this couldn't have been possible in a 1999 portable, but the mere existence of it creates a mystery by itself.

The experience of exploring a strange lost media game is perfectly made here, and I would love if Bem Feito was only this, even if this resulted in a smaller game. But there's more, not in the same level of quality. You can also get access to messages and documents that have information about how the game is created, who was involved and why it was forgotten by the general public. I don't dislike the concept of expanding the lore, giving you more to theorize about, but the execution was really subpar.

Instead of rewarding a good exploration of the ROM, or smart players that connected the dots, 90% of this part of the game is just... reading? All the passwords you need to access locked information are on the game achievements' names, and even you can find a secret or two by yourself, I don't think it was satisfactory. Without this lore dump, the adventures of Reginaldo were truly a mystery with a message, but now, it feels something too artificial. I know that every theory in our heads are better than all the true stories we learn after, but the riddle was so plain that I wish I hadn't tasted it.

It's strange to say like that, but I wish Bem Feito finished early when I was playing it. It understands so well the idea of what is the core of a gaming creepypasta, but fails on complement with a mystery that, to be fair, didn't need to be explicit to pass its message. I hope to not have damaged the experience of the game to you, but I hope to have aligned your expectations so you can enjoy the best parts of this amazing work. And, if you really want to meet Reginaldo and his friends, remember: you become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.