This Bed We Made Review (PS5) – I’ve always been a sucker for contained mystery stories, whether they are horror stories, murder mysteries, or epic drama and the human experience.
This Bed We Made combines many elements to create a compelling story of heartbreak, love, murder, and mystery. It hooked me from the beginning and kept me hooked until the end.
This Bed We Made Review (PS5) – A Short Experience That Kept Me Hooked From Start To Finish
A Compelling Story That Kept Me Hooked
You play as Sophie, a maid in a prestigious hotel. Sophie is full of life, but she has a dark secret. She loves to snoop around people’s rooms. While cleaning, she goes through their things and imagines their life through their belongings. While snooping, she comes across photographs of herself that a guest has captured of her snooping.
This sets the premise of a story that spans an entire night as Sophie begins to uncover a mystery not only about why someone is stalking her but also about some of the other guests staying on the floor. I won’t spoil the story as it’s the bread and butter of the game, but there are plenty of surprises in store, which are based on the decisions you make and actions you take.
Sophie has a lot of decisions to make throughout the story. Does she take the pictures of her transgressions and destroy them to hide her snooping? Does she ask someone else in the hotel to help her figure out what’s going on and who these guests are? These decisions play into the scenes that may unfold and the ending you’ll unlock at the end.
Every action you take and everything you do at the moment impacts the story. It’s a fun system encouraging multiple playthroughs to see how everything plays out. Finding out the true main ending was a blast and took a lot of perfect decisions on your part.
Solving Puzzles Requires Some Thought
Most of the game involves you moving from room to room, looking for clues that connect the guests and the mystery of what they are and what they are all doing in the hotel. As you collect clues, Sophie writes everything down in her journal, but you must remember to return things the way you found them as it may lead to people discovering someone had been snooping in their room.
As you collect clues, you’ll find safes and hidden messages you must unlock and decipher using cipher keys. These act as the puzzles in the game, and for the most part, they aren’t that tough to figure out, but the game doesn’t hold your hand throughout.
I found myself stuck on multiple occasions just looking and examining every piece of object and note I could find.
I did run into some problems where Sophie can provide you with hints of what to do next, but she sometimes won’t say anything, leaving me stumped about my next task.
There was also a moment where I was able to solve a cipher just by guessing what it said, but I wasn’t able to progress until I found the cipher key that provided the answer for me.
A Great Setting That Shows You Just How Times Have Changed
Visually, the game is quite good. Taking place in the 1950s, the etiquette of the hotel and the rooms was perfect. Set up the period as do the character’s mannerisms and bigotry.
You’ll find plenty of flyers and letters about the treatment of women and homosexuals and mental disorders during the time. These things play into the game stories and Sophie’s beliefs that build on her character and help you understand her motivations and some of the decisions you may have to make.
The character models are decent, but I wish the facial expressions had more detail. I don’t expect everything to be mocap masterpieces, but when you see someone with a shocked look, it will help if the entire face has a shocked look, not just a portion.
A Great Voice Cast Brings The Characters To Life
There isn’t a lot of music in the game, but the ambient music. It fits the narrative and setting just fine. There are also some catch French Canadian tunes as the game is set in Canada.
The voice work is also really good, with a lot of variety. All the actors did a great job bringing their characters to life. It’s just a shame that, depending on your decisions, you may not encounter or interact with a lot of the cast.
This Bed We Made is an excellent narrative-driven story about human nature. It also brings with it plenty of mystery to uncover.
Though some of the revelations may not be to everyone’s liking, the variety of how you reach those revelations is compelling enough to keep me going from start to finish. It’s a shame it’s such a short experience, but it also works to its advantage with plenty of replay value and multiple endings.
This Bed We Made is now available on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5
Review code kindly provided by PR