This Bed We Made Review

In This Bed We Made, a third-person mystery game set in a 1950s hotel, you play as a maid called Sophie. Developed and published by Lowbirth Games, this title was released on the 1st of November and lets you snoop around the hotel rooms and figure out people’s secrets.

You start in a police station and are being led to a room for interrogation; it’s not clear what happened and why an officer is interrogating you. Once the questioning starts, you are transported to the actual game, similar to the “one week earlier” trope. You start by cleaning a room, which adds a tutorial for the game. When you finish and exit, a coworker calls you to clean something in the lobby. After doing so, Sophie wants to return the belongings of the person who caused the mess you had to clean, which he lost there.

Once in the guest’s room, you find out some very disturbing things, which I will not spoil. That’s when the real narrative begins and when the game gets very intriguing. There are multiple endings and all of them are really interesting, making This Bed We Made’s story a very engaging one. There are a lot of social themes present that make it that much more impactful — feminism and LGBT rights, which weren’t very advanced in the 50s, are a repeating aspect of the game. It reminds me roughly of Life is Strange and is almost as good as its story was.

There are a lot of puzzles scattered throughout the different rooms, and solving them can range from being very trivial to requiring you to think for a while. Everything you do, even the smallest thing, such as picking up some items or even how fast you move your mouse, can influence the rest of the game. The only problem I had with the gameplay is that there are a lot of segments in which you just need to walk around and find some items — which, while common in games such as this — isn’t very fun design. 

Lowbirth Games used 3D models of characters and objects so it’s clear a lot of effort went into making This Bed We Made look great. While it’s not a huge deal, animations don’t look as refined, especially with character’s faces and limbs when crouching. Overall, though, the game doesn’t look bad, and I would not expect something that good from an indie.

There are two different languages for both voice and text in the game: English and Quebec French. While I’m not sure which is the original, I found the English setting to be much more immersive and enjoyable, and it is very well performed. I could listen to the people who voiced Sophie and Beth: Victoria Diamond and Zoé Tremblay-Bianco talk about anything and I’ll enjoy it; that’s just how good the voice acting is. The French setting is fine, and my not liking it could be explained by my French being very rusty, though, especially since the voice actors are the same. There isn’t a lot to say about the music; it’s used really well throughout the experience, but it’s nothing memorable or worth noting.

Some bugs are present throughout the game, and it could be a little bothersome. The engine uses the time you spend in an elevator, going up and down the floors, to load the levels. While this is a good system to not break the immersion, it caused one of the weirdest bugs I ever got in a videogame before while in the elevator, everything turned into the basic world used in the game’s engine, with dev textures and nothing but the floor and my character. It solved itself after about 15 seconds, and it successfully loaded the world, but that was a very immersion-breaking bug. Glitches aren’t a very prominent issue, though, and I don’t think there are any game-breaking ones.

So overall, This Bed We Made is a great experience that includes an amazing story and is really immersive. There aren’t any major problems and the positives massively outweigh the negatives. Featuring a good and hopeful message about social issues, it is definitely a good game and is definitely worth your money and time.