Bear and Breakfast

You are a bear! On a walk through the forest with your animal buddies, you discover an abandoned building and a talking shark robot thing, who draws you into a pyramid scheme for developing resorts for tourists. Everything is hand drawn and the dialogue is really funny. Really everything about the game is relaxing and cosy. The gameplay loop revolves around building rooms for guests, meeting their needs for decor, comfort, heat, hygiene and food, whilst collecting their trash, designing special rooms and generally running a hotel business. Although it's very polished and there's lots of attention to detail, it does suffer a little from pacing and UI issues towards the end.

Pros

  • The dialogue is brilliant. Pretty much every exchange had me smiling. Hank (the bear) is adorable.
  • I love that you're given dialogue options to choose from, but when you speak to the old lady it just says "Excited bear noises", and she still understands what you said
  • There are controls for different visibility options like walls down, walls up, roof on etc. (although I never used them and always had the walls down)
  • Unlike games like Stardew, you can sleep through the night wherever you are any time after 9pm (but you don't have to)
  • There are LOTS of decor items in the game... although they get very expensive, and you don't get much trash to buy them with, so I never bought about 2/3 of the items
  • Beautiful hand drawn art style and animations. I never got bored of seeing hank amble around the countryside (and you get an item a few hours into the game that doubles your walk speed)
  • I like the building system. Objects can stand on the floor, go on the wall, and some items can be stacked on top of other items like vases on tables
  • There's a few monuments in each area which you can fix up to increase the number of guests that request rooms each day. However, the areas are quite large and there's not really much to do in them so I'd love some more monuments to fix up
  • Over time, you unlock new UI features like the local map, a global map, telling the exact time etc.
  • Over time, you unlock new management loops for your guest houses such as bathrooms, cooking, dining rooms etc
  • There are a wide range of pretty environments to build in
  • The cooking mechanic feels quite unique, at least from the games I've played
  • Weather effects make the world feel a little more alive like rain, snow and heavy wind
  • Guests drop rubbish. Rubbish is used to buy decorations from the racoon. It's a nice little cycle that encourages you to keep a constant flow of guests so you can buy more decor. However, there's never enough trash so I always ended up just buying the cheapest smallest decor items to fill up the rooms to get guest scores met. If the decor you obtained was increased by about 50%, people would have a lot more freedom to build pretty rooms
  • Before we get to the cons, I will say that I think the game is excellent and I really enjoyed it. However, I do think it could do with being 20 hours rather than 30, and the final achievements are a really dull grind compared to the rest of the game.
     

Cons

  • I don't like the main reason you start the bed and breakfast - as part of a pyramid scheme for a shark robot. It would have fitted the game's aesthetic better if it was something like just because Hank wanted to meet humans rather than get ripped off by a large corporate
  • In the early game, there's very little to do during the day. Nothing to do except wait for the guests to leave
  • You can't sell anything. Upgrading rooms means buying a constant stream of new furniture and decor, and there's never enough resources to do that at a decent pace, so allowing people to sell things for money / trash might help to offset the pacing issues
  • I can't see cooking recipes unless I'm in the kitchen, so I never know what I need to forage for or buy when I'm away from the kitchen
  • I had to google several of the quests. For example, there's a quest to get Tony a "Smol Bear Carving". Hank tells Tony that he's making it himself, which made me think I needed a blueprint and to craft it, but you actually buy it from the decoration vendor.
  • As you get towards the end of the game, you can hire staff which kind of help, but you can only hire them in one location each (one cook, one heating guy). I need to provide food for loads of guests in both Pinefall and Winterberry, and it's a massive chore trying to keep up with it
  • The end game is annoying. You have to explore a series of caves that are as far away as you can get from a fast travel point, and you have to keep going back and forth to get prospectors tools, logging tools and cooked meals
  • The UI is the game's biggest problem. For example, the "Organize inventory" button doesn't stack items. You can only buy one of something at a time. To transfer items into or out of the stash, you have to click the item, move it to a slot in the stash and click again over and over again. You can't just shift click an item to transfer it to a container.
  • There is an arbitrary inventory limit. I'm carrying hundreds of planks and tons of concrete, which is apparently fine, but there's a hard limit on inventory slots. This just gets in the way and has no positive effect on gameplay. I was constantly throwing things away making it even more grindy to get those materials again

Wishlist / notes on design

  • Windows currently have no function. That's kinda weird. I can have a guest house with no windows at all and no one cares. Maybe they should be either a requirement for rooms, or add a decor bonus to encourage people to use them.
  • It's perfectly fine to have the only entrance to a guest's room be through another guest room. As long as it has a door, it's fine. That's weird.
  • There really needs to be a way to quick transfer items from your inventory to stash. It fills up quickly, and I have to click to pick up then click to put it in the stash
  • Add shift-click for adding multiple windows and doors at once. It works for furniture, but not doors or windows
  • The music stops in build mode. I spend a lot of time in build mode so I ended up using Spotify instead of the game music, but it'd be nice to have background build mode music too
  • When cooking, there is no search or filter, you just have to scroll through a very long list of recipes. I'd love to see some kind of filter to show me recipes that I have the ingredients for
  • I had a constant shortage of iron plates, even with scavenging the junk yard every time it respawned

Bugs

  • I couldn't build a bedroom in Pinefall because it said there were invalid objects in the room, but there weren't
  • Clicking on the fast travel map doesn't select locations properly. It works ok if you use the list view on the right
  • When you're using the Pager, if you fill all the rooms in one resort, then move to the next resort, it shows you the list of bedrooms, but it's highlighted the list of guest requests, so you have to click bedrooms first, then back to guest requests to get it to work
  • Sometimes the bathroom door gets a "no entry" sign on it as if there were a guest inside, but it's empty
  • Some of the quest directions are wrong. Particularly towards the end, the bats refer to "a cave in the east", but it's in the west
  • When you're assigning guests to rooms, it should show you the guest requirements on the same screen as the rooms. Otherwise you have to look at the guest, remember what they like, then look throught the list of rooms comparing them from memory
  • If you're in a bathroom when a guest walks in, it locks you in there until they leave
  • The resort quests often refer to "host guests with the X trait", but the traits are never mentioned anywhere on the UI - you just have to infer that they mean guests who want a certain special room based on the quest description
  • Sometimes the list shows "no guest requests" even though in the sidebar it says "9 guest requests"