Idle Thoughts

It’s a competent murder mystery. So what? (★☆☆☆☆)

This Bed We Made would have been an excellent point and click circa 2002. The graphics are decent, at least by indie standards. It has a novel angle: the “detective” is a maid in a Montreal hotel in the fifties. It has everything you’d expect from an adventure game murder mystery: red herrings, characters with secret lives, personal documents to spy on, and a true culprit whose identity comes out of left field. This Bed We Made is a competent murder mystery.

So what?

Airports have entire racks of copy-pasted murder novels with titles like “The Darknest Night of Death” or “The Killer is the Murderer”. The Brits produce murder mysteries on an industrial scale. Midsomer Murders has been going on for, I think, 150 years now? Not to mention all the American stuff like CSI and NCIS and a million crime dramas. And then there’s “true crime”, plus all the classics like Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes, etc.

I’m not saying it’s been done to death, who doesn’t like a good murder mystery, but it’s a very well tread path. We’ve all seen and read hundreds of these. To my mind, it’s not enough to make a murder mystery in video game form. Even that is not really new. The real question should be: how can you best use the possibilities of video games to make a murder mystery?

It feels like the developers found the answer to this question, they just couldn’t or didn’t execute it properly. It’s a game about a maid! You could have needed to juggle both your actual job as a maid and your role as a freelance detective. Perhaps there could be some kind of schedule to adhere to, making access to certain rooms time-sensitive. You could play cat and mouse with the guests, lure them out of their rooms, plant evidence to make them act in a certain way, etc. Kind of like Hitman, but for solving crimes instead of committing them. Reverse Hitman, if you will. I’d play that game!

Sadly, This Bed We Made is a game about being a maid, but the maid part is quite pointless.  You empty some trash cans to find some hints. That’s it. Cleaning doesn’t figure into it. You could switch the main character with a detective and you’d have basically the same game.

Is it weird that I found the cleaning to be the most satisfying part of the game? I think they should have made a maid sim first, and then layered on a murder mystery. Maybe if you keep your head down and just do your job nothing mysterious ever happens. Your decision to snoop would set things in motion, not some predetermined story arc.  I could see some developers being wary of building an entire game out of chores. And yet… we live in a world where PowerWash Simulator is a big hit. If you include stuff like Crime Scene Cleaner and Viscera Cleanup Detail, crime-related cleaning games are already their own subgenre.

There’s nothing impossible about what I’m asking for. Happy’s Humble Burger Farm is a game with a huge underlying mystery, but it never forgets that it’s really about flipping burgers. Plus, it seems to have been made on a budget the size of a teenager’s allowance. So yeah, I would have loved something similar to Happy’s Humble Burger Farm, except, well, less of an acid trip. That would have been a great game.

This Bed We Made doesn’t even do an especially good job of being a video game in the usual sense of the word. The game opens by telling you your choices matter. Like every other game that claims this, it is lying. You get to choose your helper early on in the game, which takes the game down a different route. However, a lot of the dialogue remains the same word for word. The game also has a whopping three different puzzles. To be fair, they are well made and it is a short game.

There’s also the idea that you can throw away any piece of evidence to tip the scales for or against a specific suspect. This isn’t new either. Destroying evidence to affect the ending was a feature in Déjà Vu all the way back in the eighties. The impacts of this system are pretty scant: the endings are the usual minor dialogue variations with different slides for each character. I tried a second playthrough to get the “perfect” ending, but the game still treated me like I slipped up somewhere, without any indication as to what I missed. That’s pretty disappointing.

It’s also interesting that the main character’s self-proclaimed flaw is that she likes to snoop in the guests’ rooms. It’s interesting because, really, that’s what the murder mystery genre is all about. It’s not about dead bodies, it’s about snooping. It’s about being let in the most opulent mansions, the most select clubs and picking apart the relationships of everyone with everyone else, all through the eyes of the detective. I guess you could completely remove the crime part, but then it would just be Drama. That’s a genre too, but not as immediately fun I suppose? Anyway, with that in mind, a hotel is a weird choice of setting. Hotels are the same everywhere. A hotel could be anywhere. It’s a big bunch of impersonal rooms. Here, you don’t even get to explore much except a handful of rooms on a single floor and the staff area. There isn’t even a conservatory or a ballroom to find a lead pipe in!

There’s also the subject of the game’s main theme: the fifties’ conservative morals regarding mental illness and homosexuality. Obviously, I fully expect a sermon and presentism in any video game produced today. It’s not even a surprise if it’s presented as a plot twist. We’ve all played Gone Home, right? That being said, I suppose This Bed We Made handles its heavy-handed moral lesson fairly well. Choosing a different helper also stealthily “chooses” a different social issue for your playthrough. It’s weird to have something like this depend on a completely arbitrary decision. Anyway, if they wanted to showcase social issues, how about the fact that the French-speaking majority in Quebec was considered an underclass in its own province? That would have been an original subject that flows directly from the game’s setting. It’s even baked into a story about a hotel in Montreal, where all the holders of capital spoke one language and the staff spoke another one. Not everything has to be germane to some current day culture war battlefield. This is especially true if you want to do a period piece. Isn’t this what diversity is supposed to be about? Seeing things from a different perspective? I’m all for different cultures being showcased in video games, but there’s nothing in this game that wouldn’t fit perfectly in the amorphous blob of Anglo-Saxon culture, except the fact that the intro song is in French.

By the way, the French dub is quite weak, which is disappointing since most of the characters are native French speakers. They can’t even get the pronunciation of the main character’s name straight! To be more precise, the voice actor for the main character can’t even pronounce her own name right, while the others in the cast can, which is even worse.

It feels bad to dump all over an indie like this. But I’m not IGN. I’m not reviewing schoolwork on a 7-10 scale. I’m not grading based on effort. I’m just me and I review according to how much I like something and how much of an impression it left on me. The developers of This Bed We Made technically didn’t do a bad job. It just wasn’t a job that was really worth doing.