Who Stole My Beard?

I have a soft spot for games that exist because someone needed to make them, not because a market study said they should. Who Stole My Beard? is that kind of project. Neil Collier, a one-man operation under the Cleardot Games name, built this thing partly as a love letter to his late German Shepherd Leo, and partly because the premise of a society legally requiring every citizen to wear a beard felt too absurd to leave alone. That origin story seeps into every corner of Beardsville. The city has a texture to it that feels personal rather than procedural. The game sits in an interesting genre middle-ground. Structurally it leans on a top-down RPG skeleton, but it plays much closer to the classic point-and-click adventure tradition, with a light card-and-puzzle-based battle system layered over the top for the moments when the Beardsville Police catch you sleuthing without the right facial hair equipped. The core disguise mechanic is what holds everything together: you collect and equip different beards, each granting access to different buildings, NPCs, and plotlines. Equip the wrong beard outside a restricted district and you are in trouble. Hunt down the legendary wizard beard and you get a skeleton key for the whole city, which is both satisfying and slightly game-breaking if you chase it early. The time-loop structure adds a quiet tension underneath the comedy; the same day repeats at midnight, and you have to untangle the mystery across multiple cycles before the annual Beard Festival collapses into something much worse. The puzzle variety is genuinely broad. Escape-room sequences, logic problems, code-breaking, riddles, and wacky minigames (darts, trivia, butterfly catching, apparently also tomato sauce) break up the investigation nicely. The cast runs over 200 named, bearded characters, and while most are flavour, enough of them have full quest lines and gift preferences to keep the social side meaningful. Side quests occasionally suffer from unclear signposting, which has tripped up players enough that the developer shipped a full written guide shortly after launch, and patched bugs within a day of reports. That responsiveness is worth noting on a game this small. Combat spikes unevenly, with a couple of encounters significantly harder than everything around them, and the save system (auto-saving only at the end of each in-game day, or on a manual early-sleep) can frustrate players who want finer control over their progress. The soundtrack is the quiet star. Players who bounced off similar games have repeatedly cited the music as the reason they stayed. It does exactly what a cozy RPG score should do: makes a slightly absurd world feel warm and worth inhabiting. The retro pixel art has a few rough animation moments, but the overall visual identity is coherent and charming. For players who grew up with Monkey Island or To The Moon and are chasing that unhurried, story-first feeling, this lands in that orbit without fully matching those heights. Steam user reception sits around 90% positive, a small but consistent signal from the people who found it. Who Stole My Beard? knows what it is. It is a cozy, comedy-detective RPG for players who do not mind a dog in a suit delivering bad puns while they piece together a civic conspiracy. It does not waste your time with bloat, but it does occasionally make you feel slightly lost without the guide open. If you have ever wished Stardew Valley had a harder-edged mystery at its centre and fewer crops to water, this scratches a real itch. Come for the premise, stay because Beardsville ends up feeling like somewhere you actually want to spend an evening.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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