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I have a problem with optimising the fun out of a game. It’s not always just about being efficient either. I often spend way too much time on just sorting inventory, so much so that I’ve given myself a nickname for it: the General Inventory Management Person, or GIMP for short. Resource management games are the worst for me since I find myself spending hours on the internet reading about the best way of doing a certain thing. There’s nothing wrong with trying to play a game as efficiently as possible. The problem, for me, is that I feel compelled to. It’s similar to perfectionism.
So then along comes a game called Bear and Breakfast. The game is ostensibly about managing hotels in the woods. You play a bear, by the way, called Hank. Everything has a hand-drawn aesthetic reminiscent of old cartoons, with ambient forest sounds and chill music. Human tourists are poking around in the forest, and you end up starting a bed and breakfast for them. To do so, your bird friend Will convinces you to take a loan out from a shark named Fin dressed in a plastic suit. I’m pretty sure Hank got scammed by Fin to join a multi-level marketing scheme of running just-about-adequate hotels for whatever company it is that Fin works for. However, it doesn’t seem to bother Hank. He’s just happy to keep busy and help the community. The hotels are for human guests and at first, they are terrified of you (which is fair enough since you’re a bear). However, a few quests give you some human clothes, and once you put on a hat and some trousers, the humans seem to assume you’re just some local with a lot of body hair. Hank can’t speak human though; he just makes bear noises at them, and this seems to work well enough. The main part of the game is building rooms in your hotels and filling them with furniture and decorations. Humans come along with requests for certain room types and give you money in exchange for goods and services. There are also quests from other forest creatures or Fin to point you in the right direction for progression of your hotels. Most of these quests are highly repetitive, asking you to build new furniture, renovate rooms, get more materials, or go talk to somebody. The reward is generally access to more of the game, be that additional map zones, new furniture schematics, or wearables for Hank.
While I’m bear-ing about the place, I end up upsetting one of the tourists because I happened to renovate their room while they were still in it. They leave a negative review and what do I do? I think, oh no I’ve realised what one of the game’s mechanics is, don’t kick the humans out or they’ll leave a negative review. And then I restarted the game from scratch. An hour later (it felt that long anyway), I’m back to where I was, with no negative reviews. The thing is, I don’t think a bad review really does much to negatively impact your gameplay. You have debts to pay off, but you can do that whenever you want. I would say that Fin, the literal loan shark, is fairly generous actually. So why did I spend another hour playing the same section of the game, to realistically achieve nothing whatsoever? Good question. I’m pretty sure it’s because I wanted the “perfect”, most efficient playthrough, whatever that means. But it wasn’t enjoyable to play the game this way. So how have others found the gameplay of Bear and Breakfast? There are quite a few reviews commenting on the incredibly slow pace as well as the design of the game. Rock Paper Shotgun describes the game as “a wealth of untapped potential”, likening the linear game and quest design to a “well-intentioned but suffocating bear hug”. GameSpot, on the other hand, felt that the quests fostered creativity in building hotel rooms but would have liked some narrative elements to be more interwoven into the game. Screenrant describes Bear and Breakfast as a “cozy game” with an “ambitiously strange story” that occasionally fell short with its pacing, commenting on how certain characters, like Hank’s best friends and mum, aren’t a huge part of the game’s story after the first few scenes.
I think the slow pace and game design is what drove home a lesson for me. It’s true, the player cannot plan out each room of the hotels to get the most efficient arrangement. The game won’t give me customisable floor plans that allow me to use the best furniture in decent-sized bedrooms, provide bathrooms for everyone, and build a nice rustic kitchen. The first bed and breakfast is a glorified shed with only one outdoor toilet. I don’t know where the breakfast is, I assume Hank ate it. It will never be some big 5-star hotel, and gradually I became okay with that. Bear and Breakfast isn’t really about hotel management at all. It’s a game about Hank and his comfy woodland life. I, too, have some issues with the narrative and I think the game would benefit from a stronger story focus. Bear and Breakfast could work well as an RPG of sorts and I would have liked to see more quests involving Hank’s mum or his best friends. There is no significant driving force for me to interact with the world from Hanks’ perspective, but still I began playing the game as Hank rather than focusing on the hotel management. There was enough world building in the game for my imagination to take hold. Some days I would head back to my ma’s house and see what she’s up to. Other days I would amble from place-to-place foraging for materials or talking to my weird friends. Or I would stand outside the hotel and scare the humans by taking my clothes off. Then, perhaps I’ll go check out the, uh, rat mafia, to see if they’ve got scrap for me. The game leaves me wanting to know more about the characters and their stories, so I tried to talk to everyone to see if they said anything new or had any quests for me. The dialogue appears to revel in its cheesiness and fires puns out at every opportunity - I’m somewhat convinced this game’s creation began with the punny title. I have a soft spot for the stupid puns and cheesy dialogue though. The best puns are the ones that cause you physical and mental anguish.
Bear and Breakfast forced me to slow down. This whimsical hand-drawn world has a significant amount of downtime which gave me a chance to relax and breathe. I realised that I don’t have to do anything if I don’t want to. The hotels will have tourists arriving regardless of how low quality my rooms are. The resources around the forest spawn regularly no matter what. Quite a few of the other woodland creatures seem to think I’m irredeemably dense, but they’ll still give me quests to do. I haven’t finished the game yet and I also don’t feel the urge to rush through. I think I’d like to take my time. Real life, adult life, is often way too busy, with terrifying things like “responsibility” and “bills”. To me, Bear and Breakfast is a self-care game. I’m not allowed to optimise the fun out of this game. Hank doesn’t care about that sort of thing, you see. He’s just happy to rustle around in the forest and chill to the excellent music and ambient sounds. You know, I think I’d make a pretty good bear.
*contented bear noises*
Bibliography
Bear And Breakfast review: a cute but stifling management game that squanders its potential, Ollie Toms, Rock Paper Shotgun, 2022.
Bear And Breakfast Review - Four Star Stay, Jordan Ramée, GameSpot, 2022.
Bear & Breakfast Review: Quaint Management, Questionable Narrative, Deven McClure, Screenrant, 2022
This work is licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0
I have had the same experience with optimising all fun out of games. It led to the term "Cosy Game" losing all meaning for me, as they became the most stressful games I would play. The worst example for me was Stardew Valley, a game that brought out the worst capitalist tendencies in me. I was focused solely on raking in larger and larger profits. Ironic considering the anti-capitalist messaging of the game.
My epiphany came with Ooblets. There are no stakes in Ooblets, there are just bright colours, vibrant music and charming characters. There is a logic to the world that is perfectly crafted to knee cap and suplex your stress into the ground (RE4 style). I have never giggled so much whilst playing a game.