Damn it! I would have loved to put this game up on my hidden gem list and scream into the world, that everyone should play this game. But after finishing it, This Bed We Made is neat and clever, but is the obvious result of limited resources.

The game takes place in a hotel in the 1950s and we embody the maid Sophie. Instead of „just“ cleaning up the rooms, we are very interested in snooping around, peeking into the personal belongings of the guests to discover secrets and get some new input for the daily hallway gossip. But one day, we discover that another guest is spying on other guests and even on us, taking photos. The detective snooping marathon begins ..

We are not alone on this journey: in the first few minutes, we can choose between one of two receptionists, which from there one is our partner in crime. Crime because the game kicks off on a police station during an interrogation, so we know that something is going to get wrong down the road.

The interactive repertoire is quite basic, feeling like a 3D point and click adventure. We can only stroll through the notes and belongings of a few guests, step by step, piecing together a little mystery. But it does not evolve above this neatness. It’s easy to read, good to pick up, but is not utterly engaging as the writing is flat and the characters are kind of superficial and one-dimensional. 


I can not shake the feeling of being restricted in this game. Most of it takes place only in the lobby, the basement and one floor. But we can not freely roam and sneak around as we would like to, so we have to railroad from room to room, from clue to clue. And to me, there is often no clear connection between action and consequence, even until the very end. Because: nobody shows up. Ever. There is no sense of pressure or anxiety of being caught. No time-limit to keep us up our toes. We only have to decide, which clues we keep or put back to their original spot, because it effects the outcome of the interrogation in the end of the game.

But the game seems to sail only on the surface, playing it safe and not risking too much. Yes, it’s a small canadian studio, but that does not count as an excuse for lazy and foreseeable writing, slow gameplay and zero sense of reward. It just feels like a well-crafted prototype.

I still enjoyed my time with it, but it’s a pity, I feel disappointed after finishing it and not excited to recommend it. The best word to describe it, would be limitation . And that is the opposite of what I am hoping for in a mystery adventure.

I really liked the chill vibe of this one. I feel like 3 starts isn't enough, but 3.5 is pushing it, but I like it enough to round up. It's a bit slow-moving at times, and the second playthrough won't let you skip ALL the dialogue (I didn't skip any during the first playthrough, but in the next, I just wanted to breeze through, but could only skip a little over half).

It was interesting to see which actions had consequences (employees could get fired mid-game, guests could get in trouble at the end), but I feel like we were limited in what abilities Sophie had (throwing away or leaving something, or putting something back where she got it), though I suppose anything on the mischievous side is too far against her mousy character. Still, she couldn't move luggage carts out of the way here and there?

Getting to know the characters through sleuthing their stuff was fun, but damn, no one came by their room the whole time? You'd think one of them would be holed up there SOMEWHERE during the blizzard. The only muffled dialogue from the other side of a door came from employees, and yet somehow [spoiler] happened with no sound heard and no one touched in any of the guests rooms (after that event, you'd think the culprit would have cleared out). Kinda lazy.

I gotta give a shoutout to the lesbian pulp novel in the game: "And They Were Roommates" - one of my favourite Vines! There's also a really subtle nod when the boss repeatedly misnames Sophie Roy as "Ms Belivet" - I had to look this one up, because it's not a name you can really confuse with Roy. Belivet is the name of the protagonist in Patricia Highsmith's novel "The Price of Salt" (1952), one of the first lesbian novels with a happy ending (this is what the books found around the hotel have in common - besides the author, they all have happy endings for the lesbian characters).

Still wanna give this game at least one more go just to trophy-hunt and see if going with the male acolyte results in finding out why we have this mysterious guest who's a big deal for no reason I've found so far.