I think I bought This Bed We Made on a PSN sale. Or maybe it was one of the free monthly titles? The trailer piqued my interest. It looked like it might be a fun little murder mystery.
Mystery video games are difficult to get right. It's a tough balancing act to give the player enough information to solve the mystery, but not so much that the game basically plays itself. Can the solution be easily brute-forced? Do option prompts give the solution away? Does the player ever get that sense of "eureka!" for figuring things out for yourself?
Generally, in my experience, the bigger the game, the more difficult it is to hit that fine balance. It seems like indie games make much better mystery games due to their smaller scope. This Bed We Made certainly keeps its scope fairly small, which helps to provide a reasonable possibility space for the player to work with, and allowing for player-driven deduction and some assertive leaps of logic.
The protagonist is a hotel maid with a penchant for snooping into guests' personal belongings.
The player plays a hotel maid tasked with cleaning up the rooms for patrons. But she has a penchant for snooping around in the customers' personal belongings. The game takes place entirely in the handful of rooms that she is assigned to clean, on a single floor of the hotel, as well as the lobby, and some of the employee-only spaces in the basement. The protagonist being a hotel maid also introduces the game's core gimmick: the game isn't necessarily about solving the mystery; it's more about how you handle the evidence and clues that you find.
Your job is to decide which pieces of evidence should be cleaned up, and which should be left behind. After all, your job is not to tamper with guest's belongings; it's simply to clean up their trash. Throwing away the wrong scrap of paper could, hypothetically, get you fired. But at the same time, not throwing away certain pieces of evidence could incriminate you or another innocent character.
Furthermore, your choices will also have impacts on the other hotel staff. Your actions may reveal co-workers as negligent or insubordinate, but that negligence or insubordinance may be justifiable or sympathetic, which leads to interesting moral and ethical dilemmas. Does a co-worker deserve to be held accountable for their actions and potentially fired? Or are their reasons for the inciting action justifiable or excusable, given the circumstances?
Your actions (or inactions) can lead to consequences for yourself and other characters.
Ending-changing decisions also aren't back-loaded to the final act of the game (as is often the case with games of this nature). Instead, decisions that you make early can impact outcomes for other characters, and also influence the ending. You'll also see the fallout of some of these early decisions by the middle of the game.
All of this combines to create a great sense of weight to all the choices that you make or do not make. Your decisions and actions really do feel impactful.
I also appreciate that the inciting incident for the whole game is a personal one for the protagonist. Her motivation to investigate and solve the mystery is understandable, and it creates intrigue for the player. It also create a need for secrecy, which leads to increasingly risky shenanigans.
Over the course of the game, the story will also touch on some social issues. It uses its 1950's setting to criticize the outdated attitudes towards issues like work culture, sexism and misogyny, homosexuality, and mental illness. It also repeatedly expresses hope that things are getting better, which really highlights how much attitudes have shifted over the intervening decades. Though it also serves as a stark warning of how easily and quickly progress can be reversed by those in power, who often desire to perpetuate outdated stereotypes and regressive societal norms.
The game casts a light on sexism in the workplace, toxic work cultures, and other issues of social justice.
Puzzle rooms
The broad structure of the game is that you go into a room, and solve one or more puzzles in that room, which reveals backstory about the characters who are staying in that room. The puzzles are fairly decent. They're more complicated than simply finding a key right next to a lock, or reading a code written on a post-it next to a safe, but there's nothing too mentally taxing.
The biggest problem is that the puzzles can often rely on annoying pixel-hunting. Some of the clues take up a tiny amount of screen space, and it can be difficult to even decipher what you're supposed to be looking at (especially if you're playing on console, sitting on a couch, 12 feet away from the TV). There's no way (that I found) to zoom the camera in to focus on what the character is looking at, so you have to just try to point the cursor at every, individual object to find out if it's interactable. In some cases, this works to the game's advantage, such as in occasions in which a scrap of paper might be hidden behind a toilet or cabinet and is genuinely hard to notice unless you have a keen eye and are meticulously scouring the environments for clues.
Most of the puzzles involve a lot of reading notes and documents that you find scattered within the guests' personal belongings, along with things like photographs and some environmental clues. Thankfully, the game keeps a robust log of all of the clues that you've discovered -- both written and non-written, as well as a summarized history of all the plot points so far. Unlike something like, say Until Dawn, the in-game menus don't spoil upcoming decisions. You have to go to the achievement list if you want advance spoilers of potential game-changing decisions.
Puzzles are a multi-step process that requires work to solve, but are not too mentally taxing.
Most of the puzzles in the game simply require finding a particular combination of key items, or reading multiple documents in order to piece together a password or code. There's a few instances of finding torn up pieces of paper that you have to put back together like a jigsaw puzzle. Occasionally, a code might require some basic observation of the environment.
For example, one puzzle requires finding a handful of pieces of a torn up note in different garbage cans throughout adjoining rooms. Then you have to manually put the pieces together. But the actual message is written in code, so you have to find various ciphers scattered throughout multiple rooms, and then manually decode the message. It's not exactly integral calculus, but it does require scouring multiple rooms for clues and performing multiple steps to solve the puzzle. But the game also does not require you to actually find every single clue. You can play Wheel of Fortune and guess the rest of the message once you have enough of it deciphered, and that is a perfectly valid solution.
There are, however, a couple of hidden puzzles that reveal important clues about the mystery. The game does not really give any indication or hint to the player that you should look for these. It leaves it entirely up to the player's intuition and deduction to find this extra content, which will probably give many players a smug sense of self-satisfaction for having found it.
In general, This Bed We Made successfully walks the tightrope between giving the player enough hints to progress if you're stuck, while never feeling like it's holding my hand and walking me through the game. You can review your log for clues you may have forgotten, and you can press a button to hear Sophie's inner monologue, which may provide a hint on how to continue or where to look for a clue. But the game will rarely (if ever) flat-out tell you the solution to a puzzle.
Social messes
Navigating the dialogue trees can be a little less straightforward. Like many dialogue-driven games, the character doesn't always say what I thought she would say based on the language of the prompt that I chose. Or the conversation will steer completely off-course for reasons that are near impossible to predict, and the game doesn't allow you to backpedal to steer a conversation back the way you want it to go. This can lead to some annoying "gotcha!" moments in which the player thinks you're making the best dialogue choice, but then the character goes and shoves her foot in her mouth in order to force a worse outcome.
It's one thing when another character says something that I didn't expect, and which I wasn't prepared to respond to. But it's completely different when it's the player character saying incriminating things that I didn't tell her to say, or when she fails to provide some seemingly obvious context or excuses for what she's doing.
Conversations sometimes veer wildly off-course in frustrating ways.
The biggest disappointment that I had with the game's overall mystery is that I felt that it too clearly signposted that certain evidences were red herrings. Perhaps I just played too thoroughly and found too many clues, but by the end of the game, I felt like there was no doubt as to the solution to the mystery. I did not feel torn at all about who to implicate. In fact, the hardest part about getting the ending I was hoping to achieve was trying to make sure that I picked the correct dialogue responses to the detective.
Well, that and a glitch that caused one character to be blamed because I did not throw away certain incriminating evidence. However, the evidence in question should not have been incriminating at all -- or at least, I don't see any way that it would logically lead the character being implicated. Basically, if you do not throw away everything in one particular room, no matter whether it's related to the mystery or not, as well as a few pieces of evidence outside the room, then that room's guest will be falsely incriminated no matter what you say to the detective.
A fun little weekend mystery
I also ran into a graphics bug that made me fear that my PS5's graphics card might be dying. Textures and lighting weren't being rendered correctly, which made everybody's faces look especially pale and ghostly, and for their eyes to look cloudy. I tried starting a new game, loading other saves, and even uninstalling and re-installing the game. I even tried playing other games in the hopes that there was maybe some corrupted file saved in the graphics cache that might be unloaded if I played something else. No luck.
Eventually, I tracked the problem down to the in-game brightness setting. If you increase the brightness in-game, things look fine while you play. But if you then quit the game and re-load with that brighter setting already in place, then the textures and lighting looks all wonky. The problem is fixable by simply going into the game's settings, turning the brightness down 1 step, then turning it back up to where you want it to be.
The brightness slider can trigger a graphics glitch that makes everybody look like an awkward, lifeless doll.
Apparently, I had changed the brightness while I was playing, then played for like an hour or 2 before saving and quitting. The graphics were glitched when I reloaded the next day, but since the game looked fine while I was playing it to begin with, I did not initially associate the graphics glitch with the brightness setting.
The limited scope does have some drawbacks. The entire game takes place over a single afternoon. The guests you're investigating are checked in for extended stays, and so this game probably could have easily been stretched out to cover an entire weekend at least. This would give the player a chance to see how the rooms change, and provide a greater sense of risk that your snooping might get caught, or that you might get complaints about the room not being clean enough. A longer plot would also give more opportunity to meet and interact with hotel staff, and maybe even meet the guests themselves. As it is, there are only like 4 characters who you ever actually see and talk to. Everyone else, including several hotel staff and all of the guests are never seen once. I get that is likely a limitation of the game's indie budget, but it would have been nice for there to be slightly bigger stakes and more risks to the actions you choose to take or not take.
In any case, I mostly enjoyed This Bed We Made. It's a game about getting to know people based on their possessions, and how you can't always judge a book by its cover, and it does make good use of the limited space and time that it has available. I would definitely recommend it for anybody looking for a relatively short Hitchcockian noir mystery that you can play through on a Saturday afternoon. Or, I don't know, play it if you're just looking to do some digital chores by making beds and cleaning toilets, and don't mind solving a murder mystery on the side.
This Bed We Made has some surprising twists and turns, and not all is as it seems.