Decided to do a good old-fashioned numbered review for this one. By gar, it’s been a while!
For Christmas this year a friend got narrative mystery game This Bed We Made, which I only realized after I started playing is designed and set in Canada (bonus!). In it, you play as a nosy hotel maid in 1950s Montreal, who becomes embroiled in a tale of intrigue involving several of the hotel’s guests.
As you investigate, you must also continue to perform your maid duties, from emptying trash cans to scrubbing toilets (thankfully the mechanics for the latter are not detailed), and you can recruit one of your co-workers to become your sidekick, and potentially your love interest.
It’s a short, simple game, but largely well-executed. The mystery is less the standard thriller full of twists and more about interpersonal drama and social injustices. If you enjoy gossip, you’ll love this game, but even as someone with little interest in such things I got pretty sucked into peeping through the personal secrets of the hotel guests.
I’d also like to give a lot of praise to Victoria Diamond, who voices the lead character, Sophie. She gives Sophie such spunk and charm that you just instantly fall in love with the character.
As far as criticisms go, I found the romance angle of the game felt a bit tacked on. While both your potential paramours (one male and one female) are reasonably likable, neither really stood out to me as especially appealing, and the game isn’t really long enough for the budding relationship with your chosen partner to get fleshed out in any meaningful way.
I also found out the hard way that this is not one of those “choices matter” games where every choice is equally valid. It’s a very pass/fail system where you’re shooting for a good ending, and it seems to fairly difficult to get the best ending, especially as what’s required for it isn’t entirely obvious on a first playthrough.
On my first attempt, I got a very bad ending. I replayed the last forty minutes or so of the game with different choices, and I got a better ending, but still not an ideal one.
This is the sort of thing that would normally infuriate me, but in this case I found it only mildly irksome. There’s a couple reasons for this. One is how charming the game had been up to that point. Another is that the game is so short (~4 hours) it doesn’t feel too onerous to do another playthrough to try to get the best ending; I’m just going to wait until it’s a little less fresh in my mind before I attempt that.
But most importantly, I think it makes a big difference that this is a pretty grounded, realistic story. If there was any supernatural element, I would definitely be fuming that I wasn’t able to use my superpowers to fix everything, but it makes sense that a mere hotel maid from an era where female voices were usually discounted would struggle to shift the trajectory of events.
Overall rating: 7.9/10
Superior Realities 