Bear & Breakfast (2022)

J'ai bien aimé le jeu mais il présente encore pas mal de bug comme un succès impossible à avoir sans connaitre la fin du jeu et devoir recommencer le jeu depuis le début pour la débloquer. Je trouve aussi dommage l'existence de certains personnages à qui ont ne parle qu'une à deux fois dans l'histoire, pareil pour certains endroits de la carte. Le coté gestion est intéressant et progressif dans le sens où la difficulté augmente. Mais il prend une grande partie du jeu et l'histoire derrière est un peu mis de côté pendant un long moment. J'ai aimé joué, mais le côté gestion ne m'a pas assez intéressé pour y continuer à y jouer même avec la fin du jeu contrairement à Stardew Valley qui présente quand même des choses intéressantes notamment des updates, ce que je doute de voir sur ce jeu au vu du nombre de bug ici et là déjà présent. Aucun bug empêche le jeu mais il montre un petit manque de qualité certains, notamment aussi sur les chemins empruntable, certains arbres cachent des buissons qui empêche de passer ou au contraire nous font croire qu'on ne peut pas passer, ça fait vite labyrinthe pour se déplacer.

L'histoire a l'arriére est un peu pauvre, bien que intéressante avec un rebondissement qui m'a re intéressé à l'histoire.

Playtime: 3h40m

Review

I was looking for something casual to play and this looked cute and simple. Right of the bat i noticed there's no text speed option. You're left hammering Space, probably missing some dialogue in the process. Next there's the guessing where you can walk, because which objects are solid isn't clear half of the time.

Then you build a room and the whole game collapses. While building a room you craft objects to put into that room. You need to have every required item in your inventory before you start or the entire room is deleted. And, get this, in a game with dozens of objects to put in rooms there are no filters other than "functional" and "decorative". You want to make a bedroom? Well, scroll through the list with every item for every room and find the right item of the right level because of course there are levels too.

Oh yeah, and there's insane grinding too. And i didn't even get to the apparently abysmal cooking system. And while the game does look nice that's all it has going for it. The story elements are barely there and not very interesting. Oh god, and to have guests come to your hotels you have to go to each one manually and you can't even see the details of how long people are staying unless you're in the area the hotel is located in.

This could've been a really nice game where you make cute B&B/motel/hotel locations but instead you get this grindy, incompetent mess.

• Year played: 2022
• Platform: Steam deck
• Playtime: 41 hours
• Completion level: 100%
• Overall rating: 6.5 / 10

I was really, really excited for this one when I first saw it announced, and I still love the adorable aesthetic and overall vibes of the game, but unfortunately it missed the mark in a lot of areas.

You play as a bear living in a national park who wants to bring humans back to the area by setting up a variety of bed & breakfasts, motels, and hotels in different locations across the wilderness. It starts out great, with a couple properties to manage and lots of cute decorating and activities to do, but by the end becomes a bit of a slog. The loading screens are long, the management UIs are clunky and awkward, and you end up frequently blocked waiting for resources to accumulate. Often I'd just set my steam deck down and let it idle for a few ingame days since I had nothing to do but wait for more gold or for more resources to spawn. A lot of the management aspects are tedious, especially cooking, which seems like it's both more complicated than it needs to be, and yet too simple to be engaging. In fact, most of the systems in the game are like this, where the repetitiveness of the task isn't quite complex enough to be interesting, but not quite streamlined enough to be effortless and easy, and it ends up feeling tedious.

Still, it's a cute game and has a lot of fun aspects to it. I especially enjoyed decorating and building all the different rental locations. And I liked it enough to 100% it, so it isn't a bad game by any means, just one that could have used a bit more work. With a better UI and improved pacing, I think this could have been a real hidden gem. But as-is, I'd only recommend it to those who really enjoy indie management games.

This had so much potential to be great. The storyline and concept were amazing, just poorly executed.

I assumed with the delay to Switch while they worked on controller support it would be made well for the switch. I was wrong. The controls were terrible, even as I neared the end of the storyline I found myself still getting annoyed over the controls. It all felt like the buttons were in the wrong place and you ended up clicking 20 buttons to perform a simple action.

Regarding the actual gameplay, it felt repetitive in parts. Towards the end it felt like you were just going through the motions, doing the same thing every day.

I've had my eye on this game since the first teaser since it looked absolutely adorable, and right up my alley. I really wanted to like it. I just can't and this is why. PS: Didn't finish the complete story.

Narrative

You are a bear. You live with your bear mom and dog and bird siblings. One day after living a sheltered live your mom needs you to go to the swamp and find something. Instead of finding it, you find a robot shark. This shark lures you into some sort of MGM scheme which consists of building hotels/motels/B&Bs whatever you want to call it. During the building of your empire you meet all kinds of colourful human and animal characters.

Gameplay

You have to collect materials, to fix op buildings. Then built furniture for the rooms inside the buildings. These rooms you can rent out. You collect garbage with which you buy decorations to spruce up your hotel. You unlock more buildings through story progression, all of them have increasing amounts of types of rooms the guests want. You add bathrooms, then kitchens, then lounges etc. All of it needs specific furniture you need to craft. You also unlock better furniture through story progression.

Now here are the problems I had with the gameplay.

1. It's very repetitive. Collect materials, built beds, built rooms, repeat. However then you unlock the next level of bed, your beds are outdated now and you start over. And this happens very rapidly. Even more fun, higher level furniture is now bigger, so it won't fit anymore and you can edit the rooms, which cannot happen with guests there, so close the shit up and have no money for a night.
2. Decoration score is a joke. Your rooms need a decoration score, because certain guests have certain demands for this. However, you can't just make a nice room. To actually achieve the ridiculously high scores it's best to cram the whole wall full of paintings/clocks and the whole floor with carpets. Otherwise you can't get the score. Better decorations slowly get added but they are priced way too high. Think 30 for a score 2 painting, 350 for a score 5 painting....
3. Cooking is tedious, heat even more so. The cooking "game" is filling up ingredients and stare at a meter for 10 seconds. You cannot queue recipes, you cannot easily make a big batch, it's stupid. Later you unlock automatic cooking but it comes at a pretty big price. Later you need to add fuel to heaters. It's impossible to see when they are empty, it's just tedious. You can also automate this but also very expensive.
4. It does not respect your time. All you do is run around, collect materials, wait until materials respawn, built new beds, sadly unlock new beds the next day, repeat. Do this for 5 different locations. Run around between them to manage the guests. To unlock stuff, do a tedious fetch quest. And another, and another. Sending you all over the map. The map btw, atrocious. Cannot zoom out, cannot easily see where you are. In the meantime there is just waiting, and there is nothing fun to do while waiting. I haven't even started on the inventory.

Setting

It's set in some forest, nature park area. The art style is adorable, animations are good. The game looks absolutely amazing and I loved it. But it cannot save the gameplay. There is a variety of areas, mostly forest, but also a desert and a snowy area. It's good looking. The music fits, if it works.

Other

I've had music suddenly stop. I've had items I crafted disappear. I've had pathing issues with guests. It's far from bug-free.

Conclusion

The game looks absolutely adorable. I had some fun with it at the start, otherwise I would've refunded after 2h. But it's just some good ideas, with very poor execution. At least one of the aspects needs work to deepen the gameplay. Decorating rooms is just min/maxing making ugly af rooms and is not fun. The quests are just fetch nothing else. The management aspect, basically you can't wait to automate everything. It's also not very deep either. Something needs to happen to improve this game, until then, I would skip.

as the funny title suggests, this game seems to suffer from a lot of the same problems as ACNH to me:

• lots of bad QOL decisions, inventory management and other menus especially. lots of options and shortcuts which should have been available from the start but aren't for whatever reason
• main gameplay loop quickly becomes tedious
• does a lot of things, but doesn't do any of them necessarily well
• a lot of time in this game is spent just waiting and/or walking around collecting crafting materials
• i mentioned i hate the menus already but im gonna mention it AGAIN because god do i hate the menus
• unlike ACNH there arent any minigames or anything to help waste your time until your guests leave, so yeah that sucks
• like ACNH the artstyle is cute and some of the characters are fun and charming but it's not enough to make me want to keep playing
• the cooking part of the game is just another godawful menu and then clicking a button and then being forced to stare at a bar slowly fill up while the food "cooks" because immersion or whatever
• map sucks
• why can rooms only be rectangles fuck you
• why cant i edit rooms why do i have to delete the whole thing and remake it from scratch
• why does the upgraded furniture get so fucking huge i never have any room for it
• why is just walking around the environment such a pain because i cant tell the solid obstacles apart from the decorative stuff
• why is there never enough garbage for me to sell so i can buy decoration items
• why

tl;dr i really wanted to like this game but there's just way too many issues. i'd rather do real life chores because then i'm at least accomplishing something