I played about half of the content the game has to offer and had every intention of returning to and finishing it. But as the months go by I find myself increasingly less interested in returning to a game that personifies a hollow pastry. All personality without the satisfaction of a fulfilling dish.

With that I mean I love the presentation. Characters are charming, visuals are nice and the music is peaceful. Locations are relatively diverse and it has a good sense of humor. But its gameplay is bogged down by too many tutorials, boring fetch quests and a limited amount of variety when it comes to property management.

Too be honest I would be willing to stick it out until the end if not for the rather abysmal switch port. It runs horribly and the controls are at best questionable, at worst horrific. I won't accept that a game that looks like this couldn't play/run better on Nintendo's hardware even with its age.

Overall I am disappointed. I think the game maybe strives to do too much and got lost along the way. If I ever give it another try it will be on PC. As for the Switch version it's a classic example to make sure you check the reviews before you book your stay.

This is a very cute little management game with fun art and some clever writing. I enjoyed building little rooms and the woodsy aesthetic completely does it for me. I might dip in and out as the year goes on, but in the moment its failing to keep my interest. Theres just a bit too much running back and forth to manage your bookings, which is time id rather spend doing the fun parts of the game.

Game highlight: decorating little cabins and fantasizing about leaving Brooklyn to go live in the woods.

I've tried multiple times to get into this game because I like the concept. It's one of the most frustrating games I've ever played because I feel like it had so much potential but it just doesn't live up to it. It's just missing a lot of quality of life features that could make the game more fun. Instead of building up one hotel, you get a bunch of hotels to manage and you have to fast travel around to all of them in order to manage them. So many quests require you to host a certain number of hotel guests in order to progress the story, but the game doesn't let you skip days, so you just have to wait around for day to turn to night so that you can go to sleep to make time pass. The game does not inform you when any of the characters have a new quest for you, so you have to go around and see every character to see if they have a symbol over their head. And the game just keeps introducing more and more characters and more and more locations so it just gets miserable to keep up with, which ultimately makes the game not very fun to play because it just feels like tedious busywork.

This is a perfect management game for me, not only because you are a bear running your own B&B, but also because of how the difficulty and complexity scales throughout the game. You open new areas of the map, new inns, each time amping up on what needs to be done with each, luckily later on introducing some automations. Without going into too much details, the story told through the main quests was both interesting and amusing (I like silly jokes). Additionally, the side or management quests provided extra difficulty for each location, which I very much enjoyed. I have completed all the quests, collectibles and achievements, I can not say how long it took as I restarted my save at one point just for the joy of starting over and now my switch says 40 hours.

All that said, I'd like to give a little warning, with later bigger maps the switch has some minor frame drops, though not bothersome enough to make me quit.

With its cute visuals, chill music, and goofy dialogue, Bear and Breakfast attempts to present itself as a charming, wholesome hotel management sim to get cozy with, but it misses the mark in just about everything it attempts.

The character art used for the dialogue and short character introduction scenes is fantastic. That style is what got me through the front door, but it didn’t take long to realize that the game underneath is not very fun. That art that I showed up for is great in the dialogue scenes and all but the actual in-game assets are designed to such a low resolution that the entire game just looks muddy. Blurry lines could be excused if they nailed the aesthetic, but the visual design is messy. Colors don’t pop, foreground objects blend into the background, and half of the environments are just dark ugly forests. It’s not a world I really wanted to explore, but the game forces you into exactly that because, when you’re not working on your hotel, it’s making you do boring fetch quests or endless amounts of material collecting in the woods. When the game actually does let you work on your hotel, it’s kind of fun to decorate your own little place, but that joy is short-lived because it quickly just throws you back into another boring side quest. When you’re not wandering around collecting junk, you’re literally just standing around waiting for guests to check in and out of your hotel so you can finish some quest or get enough money to move on. Most of my time in this hotel management sim is spent doing random other shit so I can earn the privilege of working on my hotel while I wrestle with the game’s bafflingly-bad controls.

I refuse to believe that the person who designed the controller support for Bear and Breakfast has ever played a video game using a controller in their entire life. It is wild how bad this game plays with a controller. I’ve played some rough PC to console ports that do dumb things like just mapping the cursor to a thumbstick and, honestly, I think I would’ve preferred that execution over Bear and Breakfast’s completely unintuitive control scheme.

If the bizarre console controls was Bear and Breakfast’s greatest sin, I feel like I could push through it, but the game itself is sadly just not very good. All I want to do is make and decorate my cute little hotel, but this damn game keeps making me run around dark forests, do fetch quests, play its terrible cooking minigame, and scrounge for resources. For a cute-looking little hotel sim, this game sure spends a lot of time making me do boring, tedious shit.

+ Really cute character art
+ Chill soundtrack
+ Decorating your hotel is kind of fun?

- Horrible console controls
- Terrible UI/UX
- Everything between the actual hotel stuff is boring
- Too much time spent waiting around
- Gets repetitive quickly
- Annoying inventory management
- Muddy, blurry graphics
- Bad environmental/world design