Bear and Breakfast Review – A rough and rustic management sim with heart
Bear and Breakfast from Gummy Cat and Armor Games imagines what our current course of capitalism and ecological destruction will likely soon yield. Though a cheery premise – building and managing hotel resorts as a somewhat dopey, but loveable bear called Hank – this game’s setting is actually an apocalyptic future in which humans have burned and destroyed everything we created, leaving behind a world of ruins that have largely been reclaimed by nature.
But even in the wake of what late-stage capitalism has wrought, there’s someone out there still looking to make a buck. That’s how you get started in the resort game; a mechanical shark named Fin pulls you into a company called Pawn Voyage, a company that can only be described as Airbnb, but shadier. You’re tasked with finding derelict properties around the valley you live in and renovating them enough to meet the shark’s minimum standard so humans will start staying there. As time goes on, you can take on tasks to improve your properties, which will result in the guests having higher expectations for the resort and paying you more to stay there.
Like any management sim, Bear and Breakfast has a gameplay loop that involves gathering crafting supplies and exploring areas so you can in turn build better furniture and rooms for your hotels. But this loop isn’t a smooth one, especially in the early game. When you’re first starting out, most of Bear and Breakfast’s map is closed off to you. This creates a relatively small area that you can explore while waiting around for guest stays to end so you can earn money. Without access to cash, which you need to build up your properties and ultimately progress the story to open more of the map, you often find yourself waiting around for night to fall so you can sleep and advance time.
There’s not really anything to do during your early-game downtime. There’s only so much trash (another form of currency in the game) or crafting supplies you can collect before it starts to feel boring. It often feels as if your progress is being artificially barred at the start of the game, which is frustrating.
The pacing shifts pretty wildly once you do start making progress on the story. Once you have multiple resorts open, you have almost the opposite problem. Though you eventually unlock a gadget that allows you to manage all six of your resorts remotely, it’s the final tool you gain access to. In the meantime, you have to travel directly to each location to manage it. This means using the game’s fast, but not that fast, travel system of the local bus line to go between the areas you’re managing. Each property has its own renovation tasks that require materials from all over, in addition to their different manageable amenities like water and heating, so it can feel like an unwelcome distraction to have to take a break from that to drive over and manage one of your hotels so income will keep rolling in. Because even after the world has ended, you can’t do anything without cold, hard cash.
Part of this tension is solved as you add employees to your hotels. Different characters you meet along the way will agree to help out at one of your resorts after you complete their personal quests. These missions usually entail multiple steps and a good bit of travel, though, so it’s not necessarily easy to gain access to their services. Beyond that, each employee can only work at one resort at a time, so even if you have someone to assign rooms, clean trash, cook, or manage the heaters for you, they can only do it for one of your buildings. You’ll still have to manage those things on your own at the others.
Bear and Breakfast shines brightest in its character-driven story moments, which are too few and far between. The game’s cast of survivors is mostly comprised of other animals like Hank. There’s a mafioso rat who controls the valley’s flow of scrap and trash. There’s a nihilist turkey (I think?) who runs a bodega in the desert. There’s a crocodile witch who lives with her tadpole sidekick in the bogs. But there are a couple of humans sprinkled into the mix as well, and they’re the ones who largely help shed light on what the world used to be, and what led us to this current point.
Through the eyes of an old woman who used to work at a resort in the valley, a former park ranger who can basically speak with animals, and a bus driver with a penchant for video games, we get glimpses of what the world used to be; it was what our world currently is. The few human characters we see are a vision of who we may become: isolated survivors doing their best to get by. They seem content to let animals take the reins of rebuilding things, and are just happy to have some life breathed back into their home.
Talking with both the animal and human NPCs adds to the world naturally and gives more context to who Hank is as well. Unfortunately, once you wrap up their questlines, you don’t really get much more interaction, which is kind of sad since you do start to build these sweet, friendly relationships. Just when I was ready for more, the game wrapped this development up.
Though this game is infused with a sense of burgeoning community and rebirth, Bear and Breakfast also makes sure to remind the player that, though we don’t know who, someone out there is looking to recreate the same systems that caused the last disaster. Whoever is behind Pawn Voyage clearly only wants to make money, and based on some dialogue with Fin, might be doing some horror movie stuff to employees who get out of line. Hank’s actions are benign, and come from a place of wanting to help, but the same can’t be said for the mysterious corporate force behind Pawn Voyage.
The unanswered questions and dark implications of this game are what make Bear and Breakfast stand out amongst similar management sims. There’s a good balance of worldbuilding that doesn’t give away too much, and focuses on the gameplay loop – even if said loop isn’t as smooth as I’d like it to be. This tantalizes the player by hinting at the larger picture, without wasting too much time trying to flesh it out or make it a central part of the narrative for shock value. Bear and Breakfast’s rough edges ultimately come to match its rustic setting and charm, and the premise it presents and runs with is compelling enough to keep the momentum going, even when the gameplay might start to slow things down.
Bear and Breakfast is available to play on PC via Steam today. It will be available on Nintendo Switch in the near future
Score: 4/5
Bear and Breakfast for PC was provided to Gayming Magazine by Armor Games and Gummy Cat.
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