Bear and Breakfast is a game with a fantastic concept and great bones, but unfortunately, those two things are not enough to make a good game. By the time the game has lulled you into a pleasant routine, it continues to pile unnecessary, underwhelming additions to both the management simulator and the narrative, until both barely mean anything at all.
The first hour or so is a miserable slog through character dialog that's endearing at best, trying a little too hard to engage you in a story with not nearly enough information. This becomes a running theme with the story, all culminating in the final character interactions of the game being wildly overwhelming info dumps that are never foreshadowed and entirely devoid of purpose.
But when you start getting hands-on with the bed and breakfast management, the game transforms into this extremely satisfying loop of planning and building rooms, decorating your hotels, and doing extremely basic fetch quests for a charming cast of animal, human, and aquatic real estate representative(?) friends, each of which help you unlock new features to make your hosting business easier. You have a couple different systems to work with; foraging for materials provides you with the means to build functional furniture and landmarks that attract visitors, the trash your human guests leave behind can be used to buy decorative objects from a mischievous raccoon’s dumpster. Your humans all have their own preferences, which introduces a points-based rating system for your venues and the bedrooms you assign to patrons. None of this is particularly complicated, but that’s a plus for me; I’m not very well versed in the management genre, so “Baby’s First Management Sim” is pretty much a positive in my book. It’s all going swimmingly until the game stops in its tracks… for a horribly designed cooking system.
Ironically, the character who introduces you to cooking, Julia, is the best written character in the game besides our lovable bear of the hour, Hank. She has a brief backstory, ambitions, a little character arc, and cute dialogue. Her passion, regrettably, does not live up. The cooking system is atrocious. A card-based culinary system sounds like a fantastic idea on paper, but this game doesn’t utilize any card game concepts for anything other than cluttering up the UI. The game wants the process of foraging for and preparing a dish to take as long as possible, but your guests will eat them at a ridiculously fast pace. This, along with the truly terrible heating system required for the last two properties completely killed the pleasant gameplay loop that had been building up for hours. Once you’re given the option to hire your furry friends to help you manage these systems, it’s a little too late and far too expensive. After days of struggling to make enough profits per day to continue engaging with the gameplay, I ended up just leaving the game open and idle while doing other things. I came back hours later to a magically fixed economy, with enough money to finally finish the story.
The narrative to this point has been mostly nonexistent with some enjoyable character writing. The last few hours of this game consist of grating fetch quests with grand plot twists that manage to be both completely out of left field and entirely uninteresting. If any of these story beats and concepts had been foreshadowed, alluded to or set up in any way, I think it would have been fine. But for all of them to be plopped into your lap like an afterthought at the very end of the game is the final letdown of Bear and Breakfast.
The first hour or so is a miserable slog through character dialog that's endearing at best, trying a little too hard to engage you in a story with not nearly enough information. This becomes a running theme with the story, all culminating in the final character interactions of the game being wildly overwhelming info dumps that are never foreshadowed and entirely devoid of purpose.
But when you start getting hands-on with the bed and breakfast management, the game transforms into this extremely satisfying loop of planning and building rooms, decorating your hotels, and doing extremely basic fetch quests for a charming cast of animal, human, and aquatic real estate representative(?) friends, each of which help you unlock new features to make your hosting business easier. You have a couple different systems to work with; foraging for materials provides you with the means to build functional furniture and landmarks that attract visitors, the trash your human guests leave behind can be used to buy decorative objects from a mischievous raccoon’s dumpster. Your humans all have their own preferences, which introduces a points-based rating system for your venues and the bedrooms you assign to patrons. None of this is particularly complicated, but that’s a plus for me; I’m not very well versed in the management genre, so “Baby’s First Management Sim” is pretty much a positive in my book. It’s all going swimmingly until the game stops in its tracks… for a horribly designed cooking system.
Ironically, the character who introduces you to cooking, Julia, is the best written character in the game besides our lovable bear of the hour, Hank. She has a brief backstory, ambitions, a little character arc, and cute dialogue. Her passion, regrettably, does not live up. The cooking system is atrocious. A card-based culinary system sounds like a fantastic idea on paper, but this game doesn’t utilize any card game concepts for anything other than cluttering up the UI. The game wants the process of foraging for and preparing a dish to take as long as possible, but your guests will eat them at a ridiculously fast pace. This, along with the truly terrible heating system required for the last two properties completely killed the pleasant gameplay loop that had been building up for hours. Once you’re given the option to hire your furry friends to help you manage these systems, it’s a little too late and far too expensive. After days of struggling to make enough profits per day to continue engaging with the gameplay, I ended up just leaving the game open and idle while doing other things. I came back hours later to a magically fixed economy, with enough money to finally finish the story.
The narrative to this point has been mostly nonexistent with some enjoyable character writing. The last few hours of this game consist of grating fetch quests with grand plot twists that manage to be both completely out of left field and entirely uninteresting. If any of these story beats and concepts had been foreshadowed, alluded to or set up in any way, I think it would have been fine. But for all of them to be plopped into your lap like an afterthought at the very end of the game is the final letdown of Bear and Breakfast.