

It's presumably important for getting good reviews from your guests. These objects have a global effect on the appeal of your motel, which allows you to book needier guests who will apparently pay more to have their bedroom look like a yard sale, just filled to the brim with plant pots and other knick-knacks. Things didn't improve when it came to placing decorative objects. So if you make a mistake with room placement, you just gotta live with it. You can add to it, but you can't take it away. Oh, and once you've placed a room, it's there forever. To make a bed, I needed to exit the building screen, and open up a separate crafting screen, make the bed, then go back into the building screen and remake the room before placing the bed, and then confirming the whole thing. I needed to place a bed in the room before I could confirm the changes to the building.

At the workbench, the first thing I did was try to draw out the area for a nice bedroom that my first human guest could sleep in. Before I could start building, I had to repair an existing workbench outside the house, and from then onwards every time I wanted to make a change to the motel, I had to return to that workbench to do so. The building system is unwieldy and needlessly regimented. Often I was prompted to pick between two dialogue options, and in every case they clearly both led to exactly the same response, so it became a nuisance more than anything because I was forced to click one more time every time I wanted to get to the next stage of my current building quest. They spent far too much time indulging in remarkably unfunny and predictable gags, which often boiled down to "I'm a bear, you're a human, we can't communicate properly, hur-dur how droll!". I came to loathe the dialogue portions of Bear And Breakfast with a fiery passion. All I could do was partition the building into different rooms - or rather, different bedrooms, since that was the only room type available to me.Įvery small step in the process of repairing this dilapidated motel was rigidly structured in the form of quests, and after each quest I had to run back to the supplier of the quest and click several buttons to explain that I had, in fact, completed the quest. I felt a small pang of disappointment that the place had been pre-built for me, and I couldn't expand the building in any way to make room for more stuff. It was broken down and dishevelled, and waiting for me to fix it up. Too few management games give you the mix of building and exploration that Bear And Breakfast seemed to promise, and after seeing the charming hand-drawn cartoon artstyle of the game's trailers, I was raring to give the game a try.Īfter a lengthy opening cutscene and tutorial sequence, during which I sampled some of the dialogue's groan-inducing attempts at humour, I arrived at the site of my first motel. Hank's time is split between taking care of the various motels he has set up, crafting rooms, adding furniture, booking guests - and venturing out into the wild to collect resources for crafting and cooking. In Bear And Breakfast, you play as Hank - a well-intentioned and curious brown bear who decides to open a bed and breakfast for the humans that have begun to return to the valley. It's a hard truth to admit, because the game holds such a wealth of untapped potential. It wraps you up in a gigantic bear hug, and refuses to let you out of its smothering embrace until long after your enthusiasm has evaporated. They let you strike out on your own, figure things out for yourself, and create something valuable with your own two paws.īear And Breakfast doesn't hold your hand.

They don't waste time insulting your intelligence, they just set you loose in their playground. I really appreciate when games don't hold your hand. A charming little management game with a lot of potential, but one that stifles the player's creativity and enthusiasm at nearly every turn.
