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