Developer – Gummy Cat

Publisher – Armor Games Studios

Platforms – PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Nintendo Switch, PC

Review copy given by publisher

I’m always on the lookout for indie gems, especially in the oversaturated gaming market, so when I first laid my eyes on Gummy Cat’s laid back management sim Bear and Breakfast, I was more than excited to try it out. The game’s release last year on Steam and Switch was generally well received, and now the game is finally getting a PlayStation 5 release. Unfortunately the charming visuals and cute characters aren’t enough to carry what otherwise is a mechanically poorly designed game on console.

The premise is simple. You are a bear named Hank who, after meeting a weird dude dressed in a shark costume who coerces you into a B&B pyramid scheme, tries to renovate abandoned buildings to attract human guests. Accompanying you are other animal friends that follow you on this noble journey. The narrative sets the tone for a comedic and laid back adventure, and never takes itself too seriously, but the constant text bubbles and the boring quest designs of: go here, fetch that make it a slow burn.

Bear and Breakfast boasts a delightful art style that perfectly complements its lighthearted theme. The landscapes are vibrant, and the characters, particularly the animals, are adorable and full of personality. The attention to detail in the environments adds to the overall immersive experience. The sound design is also well-crafted, with ambient sounds of the wilderness, cheerful music, and subtle audio cues that enhance the visuals. The lack of voice acting does make reading mountains of text bubbles a bit tiresome though after a while.

Much of the game revolves around you walking around, foraging for raw materials, and crafting items such as beds, shelves, and chairs to fill up your B&B with. As you complete assignments, you unlock better blueprints to craft new goodies. After setting up your houses to your liking and decorating them to your heart’s content, you then fill them up with guests. Each unit of yours has a prestige level that must be increased by decorating it with fashionable items that you trade for with a raccoon next to a dumpster. The guests then leave a review, and then you move on to the next. Given this is a Bed and Breakfast sim, it’s unfortunate that the cooking mechanic doesn’t even get unlocked until a while into the game.

After you have your hotels up and running, then comes the management side of things. You have to tend to your guests’ needs and wants, which come in three categories: decoration, cleanliness, and comfort. These include things like how close bedrooms are to bathrooms, or how well-lit an entire unit is. The game arguably does get pretty deep when it comes to strategizing how to captivate more guests depending on how you design your resort and the surrounding attractions.

Despite looking cute and cozy, Bear and Breakfast suffers from an extremely monotonous and repetitive gameplay loop. The resource gathering, the building management, the house decorating, among everything else gets tedious after a while, especially when newer mechanics are locked behind progression. You’ll start your early hours trying to perfect all your bed and breakfasts, with everything placed aesthetically and tidy, but then you learn it doesn’t even matter at the end of the day given that it makes no difference to gameplay and the number of times you need to do the same actions. It doesn’t help that there is no option to run either, so you have to walk everywhere. Hank isn’t a very fast bear…

Furthermore, this is a game that is much better enjoyed on a keyboard and mouse on PC than on a console with a controller because there are tons of screens and menus to click through. Controls are extremely unintuitive, especially when it comes to building, crafting, opening your inventory, or switching to design mode. As a result, the overall experience is not user friendly and not explained well whatsoever. I’ve seen this as a valid form of criticism when the game was released on Nintendo Switch as well and it’s a shame the developers still haven’t addressed this issue with the PlayStation 5 release. Read on to see what I mean.

In order to build something, you need to find a crafting bench, press Triangle, navigate to Crafting, select the recipe you want to build, press down the right thumbstick, get no confirmation that you built the item successfully, press Circle to exit, navigate to Inventory, highlight over the item you want to place, then press Square to place the item. If you cannot build the item because it is flashing red, an error message will show up but be blocked off by other tutorials on the screen. I’m sure this will become second nature the more you do it, but it’s frustrating to learn such an unnecessarily complicated mechanic for a supposedly laid back cozy game.

The game takes up a mere 1.13 GB on your console, which makes sense given the indie nature of it. Load times are fairly serviceable but not super fast on the PlayStation 5, given it takes around 7 seconds to load in. Framerates are smooth and stable and I’ve run into no game breaking bugs. Sometimes the game will error out, and the autosave functionality forces you to go back and replay segments given there is no manual save.

However, the lack of useful accessibility features is glaring. The game offers the basics of changing subtitle languages, toggling brightness and audio, as well as rebinding controls. But given the fact that I can’t see very well, I was extremely disappointed to see no feature to increase text size, and I had to squint my eyes to see the miniscule text on the screen. It is cool, though, that there is a bear unstuck option so if you get stuck in terrain, the game will free you.

Bear and Breakfast is a cozy management simulator that has you playing as a cute bear running a B&B, but that’s about it. It seems almost like the developers learned nothing from the reception of the PC and Switch port of the game a year ago, which suffered from the same issues. I really wanted to like this game, given the delightful visuals and charming characters, but the lack of polish and unintuitive controls on the PlayStation 5 make it a hard game to recommend.