Is “Bear and Breakfast” a cute management simulator or a slow death?

Bear and breakfast is very cute, and that cuteness hides for a time that not much happens in the game’s endless opening hours. You play as a naive little bear named Hank who stumbles upon a multi-level marketing scheme that turns him into a short-term rental landlord for human tourists who, after a long absence, return to the forest where he lives with his woodland friends. As the animatronic shark that serves as the voice of this sylvan AirBnB constantly reminds Hank that he’s been scammed and taken advantage of, Hank goes from renting a decrepit cabin to running a small hotel empire with bigger and better facilities and attractions.

Now, why, you might ask, is a bear doing this job? The game doesn’t really seem to have an answer, which makes the question of why you do this work. It is, after all, not interesting. Building and operating your small hotel rooms is certainly not interesting: every piece of furniture and decor you add raises the comfort and decor ratings of the rental, and if you hit the target comfort and decor numbers of a customer, he will leave satisfied. Spending time in Hank’s Little Forest isn’t interesting either: human tourists wander aimlessly around their hotels, doing nothing but sleeping in their beds or making approving or disapproving faces in response to their environment. Hank’s little forest buddies are certainly cute running around, but they don’t do anything and don’t seem to interact with the world and inhabit it in a meaningful way, while talking to them just produces the same dialogue repeated until you advance the story. Crafting materials are plentiful on the floor, waiting for Hank to pick it up. What he will do because Bear and breakfast is primarily a waiting game for your guests to review and the story to progress.

All that clock-watching puts an unbearable weight on the story beats that make up Hank’s journey. Hank and his friends aren’t really dynamic by any means, they don’t have a lot of conflicts or goals. They are working together to restore their local tourist economy, seemingly for lack of anything better to do. They comment on the weirdness of the business they run, they wonder what the return of the humans will mean, and they set Hank other goals to pursue in the region, but at no point does the whole thing come together. unites to represent a convincing animal analogue of a community. . Even the game’s clunky satire on platform capitalism and gig work falls flat, repeating obvious and outdated points while making the vacation rental feel like a really good deal for everyone involved.

Ironically Bear and breakfast would feel more relaxing and unhurried if it had a time skipping feature. In the end, it has the makings of a decent but unremarkable visual novel. The characters are cute caricatures and the story unfolds through a series of repeating cycles. There’s no point in creating management systems for players to learn and solve, because running this whole business is just something that turns Hank into an agent of change in the story of his own little world. The question is not whether Hank box do it, but what doing it will mean. Given what is on offer in the early hours of Bear and breakfast, the answer will probably be pretty obvious, but it might still be worth seeing. It’s just not worth the wait for the game to repeatedly demand.