With a lot of survival/looter games I tend to find myself drawn in by the concept before being turned away by the execution and Pacific Drive does just that for me. There are aspects of the game I like, and with a tweak here and an addition there I feel like I would really enjoy this game, but at the moment it just comes across flat. (Get it? like a tire)

Like all games of this genre there's the gameplay loop: go out into the world, gather resources, return home, upgrade yourself/things, venture out further into the world. Pacific Drive is the same. You fix up your car, head out into "The Zone" (no really), gather supplies to fix your car with, come back, fix your car, and head out again. The problem with Pacific Drive is it feels like it's a true loop. As in, I feel like i'm in the exact same spot once i've exhausted my resources as I was before I went out to get them in the first place. There's no real survival aspect, there's no base building or expanding to do that I came across. The resources you gather are mainly to repair the damage caused by going out on your latest run. You drive car, you fix car, you repeat. Now driving the car, gathering up stuff and exploring IS fun, I just wish it felt rewarding to do it.

Now you might remember how I said earlier that part of the "traditional loop" of these sorts of game involves venturing out further and further on each run. This brings me to my next issue with Pacific Drive which is that venturing out further consists of leaving the garage, hitting a loading screen, and the game putting you into a small map and telling you that you have gone further into The Zone (No... really). The game takes away the anticipation that should be building with passing familiar areas on your way to unexplored territory, by just putting you out there. And after you've picked up your supplies how do you think you get back the garage? Why it's another loading screen, once again taking away tension that should build with having your supplies and now needing to be able to make it back home with them.

I hate to sound like i'm just hating on this game. I do like the idea, I like the environment, I like the car, I liked playing the game up until the point where i felt like I had experienced most, if not all, of what the game had to offer. I feel like the addition of something else to put your supplies towards would serve the game well, like NPCs who need them to survive, bringing a choice of "do I give these to other people and leave my car lacking for the next run, or potentially harm others so my car is in top shape?" For the time being I think i'm done with Pacific Drive, but i'm hoping as time goes on there will be a reason to come back to it.

played for around 8 hours and I still do not have a clue how this game expects to be played. collecting resources is mind numbing and boring, I don’t feel like there’s any real stakes, all upgrades seem to just lessen the effect of frustrating mechanics instead of making the game more fun, and the cool ”being chased by a weird laws-of-physics-defying storm and driving into a pillar of fire” thing has not really materialized at all as it’s been really easy so far.

massively disappointed, but the vibes are really cool :)

im not sure how to feel about this! i think a lot of other reviews are correct in talking about how the game is buggy and feels rushed/unfinished and the gameplay mechanics/loops are not... great. but i also think what IS here and the start of the game primarily is really cute and fun! i just wish it was better executed and there's potential here for something awesome.

the decorating of the resorts becomes redundant when the premise of levelling up rooms and earning points is based on just reusing the same highest-level furniture over and over, and managing the resorts themselves becomes kind of pointless in the endgame. once you complete the quest of giving 50k coins to an npc (which is a bit of a tiring grind to get through) there's really no need for money anymore and i spent the entire last portion of the game ignoring my resorts and just speeding through the quests; which give you a very rushed story that feels shoehorned in in a way that doesnt fit at all, and the story for the game also just kind of... ends. there is no game over screen. there's no concrete finish to this and completing the last main story quest left me confused as to whether the game was even over or not--its very abrupt and im not particularly a fan of a lot of things going on here.

i love the art style, i love hank and the characters and i find the initial gameplay premise very fun (i didnt mind the cooking mechanic either! it was a nice change of pace) but i just think it gets boring around the midpoint and doesnt offer anything interesting to keep you engaged. getting to the end was a little difficult and i think im disappointed that i didnt enjoy this as much as i wanted to!

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

I really enjoyed the first 10-15 hours of Bear & Breakfast. Around the middle of the game, the emphasis shifts from designing to managing, which I found noticeably less fun. There are ways to eventually automate certain tasks, but by that point I was already feeling a bit burnt out.

I also found the epilogue to be unnecessary and tonally out of place with the rest of the game. There is a good game in here, but there is also a lot of unnecessary padding.

I played on Steam Deck and it worked well enough, though I imagine a mouse and keyboard is probably the preferred way to play.

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.

Gente pelo amor de Deus não caiam no bait de personagens bonitos e jogabilidade cheia de partículas legais!

Isso é uma bomba, não aguento mais jogar esse jogo!

(em jogar Leia-se entrar para fazer as dailies e sair)

A mihoyo não liga pra nós da comunidade e nem pros que realmente pagam pelas coisas, esse jogo só vai pra frente porque parece minimamente Zelda e porque a história principal é mais ou menos envolvente.

(uma vez por ano vem um loiro do void e te explica alguma coisa do passado, fora isso todos os personagens nunca sabem nada sobre nada e só ficam enchendo linguiça pra você falando de novas histórias que nunca vão se entrelaçar)

Obrigado Pamis e Carluxes por ouvirem meu áudio de 3 minutos reclamando da missão da ilha do passarinho lá de inazuma.

NÃO joguem isso, vão fazer algo melhor!