This Bed We Made is a third person noir murder mystery set in Canada in the late 1950’s. You play Sophie, an over inquisitive hotel maid, who likes nothing better than snooping and rummaging around in guests’ belongings.

Play as Sophie and try to get to the bottom of the mysterious goings on

The game opens with Sophie being interrogated by the police about what had happened at the hotel. After a quick title screen, we are playing as Sophie.

Sophie has several skills. Her maid skills allow her to clean the rooms, replace towels, make beds, clean toilets and baths, though along the way her detective skills kick in. She can pick up numerous objects in the game to inspect them. She can also rotate the objects, important as sometimes there is vital information written on the back.

As she progresses, she also gets to use interactive objects to solve small problems, like using a screwdriver to open a vent. Lastly, she can use her deductive skills to gain access to safes and other locked objects.

The play area is not vast, consisting of the floor that Sophie cleans, the lobby and the basement. Likewise, there are only a few characters to interact with. Bernard the owner, Beth the receptionist and Andrew, depending on your game choices you’ll be mostly interacting with either Beth or Andrew, but not both. This is a game with multiple choices and a lot of the choices will depend how the story plays out, especially the ending.

Explore the well detailed environments

Although small, the gameplay area is well realized. Not only is the environment well detailed, but the designers have thought about the ambient sounds in the hotel. Most of your time you’re in the body of the hotel but go near one of the windows and they include the sounds from outside, a nice touch.

The character models are nicely detailed too, so it’s easy to buy into Beth and Sophie as characters. I also found myself impressed with the vocal acting and the incidental music.

My first playthrough only lasted about four hours, which may seem short and in truth it is, but to see all the choice branches and to get all the achievements, you’re going to have to play through it three or four times.

This Bed We Made is a third person noir murder mystery

Of course, what holds it all together is the central mystery, are we discovering blackmail, adultery? I think the final reveal will pleasantly surprise you.

This is very much an independently produced game, evidenced by the same repeating names in the credits and as such is quite an accomplishment. Yes, I would have liked it to have been longer and set over a greater area, but for what it is, it’s a little gem, well worth playing.

9

Charles Packer