This is one of those little indie games I found on a Facebook ad that caught my eye. With a 1950s hotel setting and a mystery to solve, This Bed We Made hit a lot of my areas of interest. I picked it up at release for about $20, cheap indie games are the only games I buy at release anymore.

From the start you can tell the developers, Lowbirth Games are a small team with a smaller budget. The character animations are all a bit stiff. It’s most noticeable in the walking animations. They look like the rough draft of animations, meant to be a placeholder before the final polish. There seems to be more effort put into the bigger story moments, as the animation has brief moments of humanlike motion in those. I may be making it sound worse than what it is. The stiff animations aren’t immersion breaking, just a noticeable quirk. You can also see the budget in that you only interact with three NPCs throughout the game, the two receptionists and your boss. You can hear the other hotel employees behind doors and even have a conversation with a maid who’s locked herself in the bathroom, but most characters are spoken about not spoken to. There’s a lot of real charm in all this. I’ve a little experience in making short films on shoestring budgets and I get the same vibe from This Bed We Made. They may’ve lacked funds, but they had the passion and were clever enough to work around their limitations. This doesn’t play like those low-effort simulators from Eastern Europe I’m fond of, there’s an effort here to make a legitimate game.

This Bed We Made is a bit of an awkward title for a video game but sounds at home as the name of a film noir or 50s crime movie, which I think is very much what Lowbirth was going for. The story of a maid unraveling a conspiracy in a hotel besieged by a snowstorm feels very film noir. You spend all of your time in a fancy 1950s hotel and there are lots of little details to set the time period, from clothing to the adverts and newspapers lying around. The 50s stylings were, again, crafted with care. The music is the traditional, orchestral, mystery score you’d expect. It’s nothing new, but it serves the mood and setting wonderfully.

As far as gameplay is concerned, think something like LA Noire or a TellTale game. You walk around a hotel room and examine the items left out. Lots of reading letters and solving easy puzzles. Your character, Sophie, controls well and there’s a crosshair to point around the room to see what’s interactable. This control scheme does make opening drawers a bit cumbersome, but luckily the game doesn’t hide much pertinent information in dressers or desks. In the beginning, the game sets up the standard “your choices matter” system. As I played through the game, this system lost a lot of its appeal. One of the first rooms you explore, the guest has a darkroom set up in the bathroom, my thinking was “Oh, I better not perform my maid duties here or else he’ll realize someone was in his room.” But as I progressed through the game, I started to realize that the choice system wasn’t that deep. The mix of only interacting with three NPCs throughout the game and it’s short length means the consequences for choices aren’t super important. There are still choices here and there that impact what ending you get, but they are usually pretty spelled out. If you want one of the “good” endings, you actually need to throw away most everything.

Now, the meat and potatoes of TBWM, the story. First, I think it nails the sorta classic film noir storytelling it’s going for. They don’t go overboard with it. You’re a hard luck maid with a secret, everyone in the story has a secret or two actually. There’s a snowstorm raging outside that makes you feel trapped and your boss is a tool, so you can’t really socialize with the other staff much. Sophie, being a good person, decides to return a film roll a guest dropped in the lobby to their room on the 5th floor, and that’s where it all goes wrong. When you enter the room you see the previously mentioned darkroom in the bathroom. It looks like this guest is stalking you as he has pictures of you rummaging through people’s luggage hanging up. One of Sophie’s vices is she likes to snoop, which is a clever in-game way to explain the gameplay. I chose to leave the pictures up as not to tip off the guest, but it didn’t matter. You learn he was also spying on the other hotel guests on the floor and you decide to figure out what his game is.

Slight spoilers ahead, skip to “all in all” if you want to give this game a go. As you learn more about the other guests on the floor, the mystery starts to morph as there seems to be something between two married couples. There’s also hotel drama that pops up in the background of your investigation as well. A waitress and bellhop are in relationship that is threatened by the hotel’s governess, your boss, who is having an extramarital affair with the hotel owner. The owner is running the place into the ground and the hotel mechanic is overworked holding the old building together. The city wants to put a mental hospital near the hotel, which many of the staff of the hotel support, but the management doesn’t. On a few occasions, things reach a breaking point and you’ll find the remnants of someone’s “take this job and shove it”. You can either intervene and clean up the scene before someone loses their job or let nature take its course.

Big spoilers here, the two wives of the married couples are secretly lesbian lovers and they are trying to find a way out of their sham marriages to go live together in California. One recently divorced her husband and the other took out a large life insurance policy on her husband, so his odds of survival are low. The stalker was a PI who suffered from shell shock from WWII hired by one of the women. The big finale is finding the corpse of the one husband in the hallway and calling the cops. Here is where your choices matter. If you left everything where it was, the police have enough evidence to convict the two women for murder, if you destroy evidence, you can styme the police’s investigation, letting them go free, or pin it all on the PI. It’s classic film noir. They did a bad thing for good reasons, will you as well? The story also has a heavy focus on mental illness and the stigma around it at the end. It turns out Sophie’s mom has dementia probably; they never say out right. Your love interest spent time in a mental hospital. The writing can get very heavy handed at the end in regard to mental illness, but it was done reasonably well enough that it never felt like “historic people with way too modern attitudes”.

All in all, This Bed We Made is rather short, clocking in around 5 hours of playtime for me. There’s a lot of charm to this game. Lowbirth Games made the best out of what they had available. Sophie is likeable, the story is drenched in film noir trappings, and the hotel is faithful to the 1950s. I’ll be keeping an eye on this developer in the future and I hope this game does well enough that their next game can build off the foundations laid here, even if we aren’t returning to the hotel.

This Bed We Made is a narrative-based story where your choices affect its ultimate outcome. You play as Sophie, a young woman working as a maid in a hotel, where she frequently snoops around the possessions of its guests, and unveils plots involving cheating, spying, and even murder as she goes from room to room. At the end of the game, the various choices you made (or didn't make) ultimately determine the fate of Sophie and the other people at the hotel.

The core gameplay loop essentially consists of puzzles like you may find in a point-and-click adventure, except in 3D - and cleaning rooms! There are often dialogue choices you can make that sometimes add flavor, but also can change the attitude of other characters in the game towards Sophie.

This Bed We Made has solid graphics and aesthetics for an indie title, but swings really well on the voice acting front. The VA absolutely drives this game, especially Sophie's, as she thinks aloud to herself during much of the game. Though there is dialogue in This Bed We Made, most of the game actually sees Sophie just on her own, which is favorable to the game's puzzles, but it does feel less interesting than getting more of a chance to see more of the characters that the game is based around.

You can finish a single playthrough of the game in about 3 or 4 hours, but it's very unlikely you'll get the ending you want following that. What I did find very frustrating is how difficult it is to tell what choices do or don't have significance throughout the game. In order to get the "best" endings in the game, you must make specific choices to cover up certain pieces of evidence in each room while leaving others alone. The game does not give you feedback throughout the game to indicate what track you're currently on. I didn't really find a lot of the choices to be intuitive, either.

I think I really would've given this a higher rating if that element of choice and consequence had been communicated better, or if there were more choice trees throughout the game. Instead, it feels more like a game you play blind the first time, and if you want to replay it to get the better endings or achievements, follow with a guide the second time.

I'd give This Bed We Made a mixed review - it's a cool story, but I think it could've been done a bit more elegantly.