Bear and Breakfast (PC)
After all the urban hustle and bustle of modern day life, it can be nice to take a little vacation to a quiet relaxing cabin. The welcoming embrace of the natural world is a fine way to wind down, but in the management game Bear and Breakfast, nature is literally welcoming you with open arms to come stay at its nice hotels and resorts. With Hank the bear working alongside other animals, humans are able to appreciate nature while the nature appreciates their business.
The relationship between humans and animals isn’t totally clean in the world of Bear and Breakfast though. This management game has a fair bit of story behind its setting and situations, the area it takes place in actually one that was initially abandoned by humans after a terrible fire. Stumbling across the remains of places once ran by people, Hank works together with his friends to try and bring the people back, opening up a range of bed and breakfasts as best as an animal that can’t directly talk to humans can. While your character Hank can speak clearly to all of the other fairly intelligent and capable animals of the area, there does exist a language gap between them and the humans where you can understand the humans but they only hear your voice as growls and grumbles. Luckily, they seem to understand the bear that walks upright, wears clothes, and can be seen gathering trash and building furniture is trustworthy enough that they’ll book a stay at the places you renovate.
Bear and Breakfast isn’t about making your own locations for humans to stay so much as modifying a few set locations that gradually unlock over the course of the game. Once you’ve done the fairly quick repair work, you are free to design the interior quite a bit, placing walls, designating rooms for different purposes like a kitchen, bathroom, or a room for guests, and the decor and other elements are yours to decide on. There are certain rules in place though that you must adhere too, such as needing to make rooms at least a certain size or they must contain specific objects within to function. Certainly it’s reasonable not to rent out rooms with no beds and you shouldn’t be allowed to advertise your location’s cinema if it has no screens to watch, but these requirements do rub up against the limited building area quite often. It’s hard to keep your locations looking nice when you have to cram them tight to fit everything. Some later locations are very large which allows for more plush accommodations for your guests, but it can feel like you’re boxed in a fair bit by the size of buildings and end up making more practical accommodations than ones that look nice and cozy.
Bear and Breakfast seems pretty committed to its cute and colorful art style and it does do a nice job in making the game look inviting, but this also comes at the price of there being limited clarity when placing objects. The game’s slanted overhead look of the areas you’re managing works for most standard play, but when you’re trying to slip some decorations in or attempting to place furniture just right to not leave too much empty space near the wall, gauging the available space can be rough and it can be a matter of just moving things around with your mouse and hoping it will turn from ineligible red highlight to the shade of blue that means you can place the object. Bear and Breakfast can feel a little fiddly at times because of how tight accommodations end up being and the game does incentivize you to squeeze as much value as you can out of a room’s available space.
When it comes time to book guests, all of your rooms will have certain scores to keep in mind so you can match them with a person’s preference. Comfort ratings come from furniture, guests want a certain degree of decoration, and in later locations they’ll even start to expect dining of a certain quality or certain room types like a lounge to be available. You can book people whose requested scores and accommodations aren’t met, but they’ll leave worse reviews and appropriately the more demanding customers are the higher paying ones.
However, while the tight squeeze of building in your various bed and breakfasts has its little issues, it is satisfying to properly cater to your guests with well optimized locations. The challenge is found in trying to arrange things well to keep attracting the high value customers or making upgrades to rooms as new options become available to you. It could have been made cleaner even with the consideration that limited space is where the difficulty comes from, especially since the game is a little slow in granting you upgrades that can be useful for speeding up work. For example, foraging is a large part of Bear and Breakfast, the player often needing to take time out of their day to go around looking for lost lumber, plants, food, and scrap to help in crafting furniture or cooking meals. Crafting at first requires you to go to very specific work benches in each of the major locations where you can own a hotel, but later you unlock the ability to be able to craft anywhere, something that removes the legwork in a game where you will be wandering around plenty already. Some upgrades are understandably kept until later, you’ll eventually be able to get workers who can do things like automatically book rooms or cook food but they serve as good payoffs to doing various quests and automation of duties is more a necessity once you’ve got multiple locations and repeatedly taking the bus to visit them grows stale. On the other hand, waiting on a walking speed upgrade can lead to quite a few tedious and uneventful treks between locations.
The game might want you to spend more time walking around though because while you collect materials for crafting certain items, others are bought by redeeming the litter you find laying about. Decorations almost exclusively come from trading in trash and you’ll likely always be wanting to get more decorations since guests are more demanding in that department than others, but there are also quite a few quests that you might not notice in the world if you weren’t walking back and forth so often. Bear and Breakfast begins and ends with a fair bit of story, the middle definitely made up mostly of hotel management, but there will always be quests that give the game some stronger direction than just establishing locations. You can’t actually go out of business or fail in Bear and Breakfast, even if you spend all your money you can scrounge some up and even a crummy resort can turn things around with some elbow grease. As a result, the quests are what give you more meaningful direction than merely maintaining a status quo. A good deal of these will tie to the performance of your bed and breakfasts, many of these essentially milestones for reaching certain benchmarks like being able to earn high ratings from guests, pleasing guests with high demands, or building specific room types for a resort. More personal quests though can range in what they require as Hank’s growing group of human and animal friends can have stranger demands. Perhaps they’ll ask you to cook them something very specific in the game’s rather basic card-based cooking system, maybe you’ll need to find a certain amount of materials when out forging, or repair locations near your businesses. There are definitely some that can boil down to walking from location to location rather than having a strong input, but the quests not only give you rewards like upgrades, new crafting recipes, or payouts, but they structure your activities better so you are kept busy even during the game’s fairly long days. It would be nice to be able to speed up days for when you’re trying to do longer quests like booking a large amount of guests, but you can at least immediately go to sleep once it hits night time to start the next day if you so wish.
The story itself does go to some strange and unexpected places, especially with how wholesome and silly most interactions are otherwise. You meet some colorful characters but then you learn some backstory that can be a touch dark, one big question in the air being whether it’s good to have brought humans back to the area at all. The story will go quiet for long stretches or you’ll be interacting with less involved characters who are still fun to talk with so it’s not that big of a draw, especially since it doesn’t feel like the plot elements culminate in much. Instead, it’s the directed management work that feels most important, and there is definitely some enjoyment when a new area opens up and you can start getting to work reshaping it to your needs. Still, you will probably get settled into a routine in time if there aren’t more active quests seeing you search out more involved activities, and it can be a bit surprising how hands-off managing the bed and breakfasts can be. The guests don’t break things, most special rooms like a distillery merely exist rather than requiring any hands-on work, and guests won’t file complaints or leave early if you’re not meeting their needs. The structure likely means closer management would be very difficult when you have so many locations and other tasks to work on as well, but disruptions feels like they could have provided unique quests or occasionally broke you out of your cycle of chores with some sudden excitement.
THE VERDICT: Bear and Breakfast calls itself a “management adventure”, and while adventure might be too grand a word for it, it does encapsulate the mix of activities and hotel directing the game features. The quests that help structure your work feel like the bigger focus than the day to day bed and breakfast chores but they also tie pretty closely to it, ensuring you’re often doing some mix of working towards a goal and trying to get the benefits of running decent establishments. At the same time, it can feel like management duties aren’t as deep because they’re not the only focus, limitations often weakening or slowing things down. The direction the game gives does keep Bear and Breakfast from running out of steam, but if many systems were cleaner or more complex then it could provide more consistently rewarding work.
And so, I give Bear and Breakfast for PC…
An OKAY rating. Bear and Breakfast hasn’t quite figured out how to balance its hands-on and hands-off activities. There’s almost always something you can be doing, this sometimes leading to periods of rapid progress and frequent rewards, but sometimes the activities are poking around for trash or materials rather than something engaging. The living spaces don’t allow for much expression since practical designs are enforced by the limitations put on your creative freedom, but these do assist in making it actually a bit more involved to please guests with how you’ve made use of those already defined spaces. Even before you have employees to handle some of the more frequent tasks around your hotels you’ll settle into a routine that isn’t too engaging to work on, but you also are given the quests that direct you better and motivate you to go out and try to locate the right ingredients or figure out how to make your resort match the quest’s requirements. There’s no risk of failure, but that often means the main source of strain will be waiting for materials to regenerate or other tasks that boil down to waiting out the clock. Bear and Breakfast as a result runs hot and cold, a game that can sweep you up for a stretch and then settle down when it starts putting barriers that require more time to overcome. If it could better fill downtime with more meaningful or exciting work than scrounging around then perhaps it could get away with the simple management elements, but it could have also made the management more involved or intricate so that you can instead spend more time plotting out your places than letting them run as you toddle off to your next little quest.
There are enough small systems involved in your work in Bear and Breakfast to keep you occupied, the work somewhat compelling despite its limits. There’s a good sense of progress in this cozy little world even though that can come at the price of depth, and even though many of your guest rooms will lack individual character or charm, planning the bed and breakfasts out does serve as a decent enough challenge to replace aesthetic considerations. It’s cute albeit not quite clean, but still it’s a pretty easy to get into management game that doesn’t get too wrapped up in systems or stress you out with anything unexpected, that style of play certainly having a place even if it could have done with some more involved and engaging tasks on top of that friendly accessibility.