This Bed We Made

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Matched by title — a reused name can pair the wrong games. * is a critic aggregate. Prices and positions are each store's United States storefront; Epic charts worldwide. Audience and Score too, except Steam's, which is worldwide.

Hours played at review time, across 287 reviews with recorded playtime.

positive critical· bar length = how often the theme comes up

I loved just about every second I spent playing this game (with a small exception that will be detailed later in the review). I don't know how true to life it is to actually living in Montreal in 1958, but it certainly *felt* convincing - from the costumes to the dialogue to the environmental elements such as the pamphlets, newspapers, novels, etc. to the society around the characters, This Bed We Made delivered on just about everything I could have hoped for. It also wears its heart on its sleeve - this is not a game that is shy about what it is saying or what it is doing, and I appreciate its sincerity. To be clear, this is a politically-conscious game that deals frankly with issues such as mental health stigma and homophobia in period-accurate ways. It's also a pretty fun little detective game that had enough twists and turns in its short duration to keep me on my toes, never knowing where we were going next. It is, in short, excellent. In the interest of giving a better overall picture, I should observe some of the weaker aspects, as well, so here we go: the animations for the characters are a bit wooden, with the facial animations in particular not being overly compelling; the short duration of the story (taking place almost entirely in the space of a few hours) means that some emotional developments feel a bit rushed and one moment in particular feels like it comes at a bizarre time; and I would say that the initial plot hook does ultimately feel like a bit of a red herring, though I don't know if I even really mind that much. Honestly, none of these are serious issues, and for such a small team with the specific project that This Bed We Made is, I personally wouldn't hold them against it - the right priorities were chosen, in my opinion. Conversely, I really do want to shout out the writing and performances in this game - if the animations are a little lacklustre, the script and delivery more than make up for it, and the scenario we play out is compelling and well-presented. The storytelling done by the clue-gathering of Sophie is compelling and distributed well to ensure the attentive player pieces together the story in a way that keeps attention masterfully. Now, there was a bit of time I spent with This Bed We Made that was a bit tedious, but I cannot really blame the game itself too badly. Without getting into spoiler territory, there are some choices that have to be made towards the end of the game, and it seems like it might be possible to get an ending where you can have everything you would want, but in practice it does not appear that this is the case. This would not really be a problem, as it is narratively compelling and thematically consistent to be this way, but two different guides I found really seemed to suggest that such a "good end" was possible, which kept me hunting for it for *way* too long. I perhaps would have liked it if the game had some in-game method of tracking what you have done across playthroughts/endings that showed you what outcomes were obtainable, but honestly this problem mostly existed for me because I trusted the apparent lies I was being fed. If I am wrong and this best ending is possible but I somehow couldn't stop messing it up, I retract this part of the review, but I spent almost three hours trying to achieve the perfect outcome without success. With all that said, I loved this game. 9.5/10