Corinne Cross's Dead & Breakfast is a cute, wholesome, short (ca. 3 hours) narrative game, presented in a 2D side-view perspective, with mild resource management and puzzle elements.
[h2]1. Story & Setting[/h2]
You reluctantly agree to tend to the house of an elderly lady whose son (a schoolmate of yours) has died, and who has to spend a week in a hospital. You soon notice that the house, a retired bed-and-breakfast, is occupied by several ghosts. Over the course of 7 in-game days, you learn the ghosts' stories and have opportunities to help them transition into the afterlife. In the process, you also develop gardening and cooking skills.
The story is told in a relaxed, empathic, thoughtful way and generally nicely written - it's noticeable that that the developer is a native speaker with good command of her language. The small cast of characters (4 ghosts, 2 shopkeepers, the elderly lady, a neighbor, and the protagonist) is distinct and lovingly designed, I could relate to their feelings and understand their dilemmas. The story arcs are fairly linear, but your actions will determine whether or not you can get the "best ending" for each of the NPCs.
[h2]2. Gameplay & Mechanics[/h2]
You'll spend most of your time reading and clicking through various conversations, with a few rare occasions where your decision can influence the further path of an NPC.
In addition to the narrative gameplay, the game also has gardening and cooking mechanics, but they are held very simple. You can only grow one type of flowers in your garden, and all you have to do is putting dirt and seeds in a pot, which you then need to water on two different days. For cooking, you need to learn a recipe (these are either hidden around the house, or given as quest rewards), buy the ingredients from a grocery store, and play a color-coded "press the key at the right time" minigame.
Since all of the ghosts' story arcs require items that can only be bought at the grocery store, you'll need to generate some money, which you do by selling grown flowers to the florist. This gameplay element, together with the 7-day limit, introduces a mild resource management challenge - but with a bit of forethought, I found it pretty easy to accrue all the money I needed. The game is fairly easy in general and I had no trouble getting the "best ending" for each NPC in my first playthrough. There is a "New Game+" mode that is supposedly a bit more challenging and also includes additional content, but while I did enjoy the story, I doubt that it has enough variation to make replaying it so soon enjoyable for me, so I did not do that yet.
[h2]3. Graphics & Presentation[/h2]
The game uses a 2D side-view with occasional sidescrolling for ther larger rooms. Graphics are stylized and very lo-fi, but get the job done. Soft, relaxed background music as well as occasional sound effects support the atmosphere. The game does not have any voice-acting, and while that may have helped giving the characters even more personality, they are generally written well enough to make VA unnecessary.
While the game generally has rather low production levels, all artistic elements fit together nicely, and no part was detrimental to my enjoyment. A few details (like the lighting differences between day and night, or the reward splash-screens for most characters) are done quite nicely.
[h2]4. Usability & Accessibility[/h2]
The game's settings consist of 4 volume settings, an "always dash" toggle, and a very comfortable key rebinding system. Instead of listing actions and letting you assign one or two keys to each of them, it displays a keyboard and lets assign any action to any key. You could, if you wanted, assign the "inventory" function to more than 50 different keys. This system unfortunately also has a downside - since the displayed keyboards only offers the US ASCII layout, there is no way to assign functions to language-specific keys that do not exist in that layout. Nevertheless, this system should cover more than 95% of cases where players want or need to rebind their keys, and it's very nice that this single indie developer invested the time and effort to provide an important feature that many triple-A products in this genre neglect.
The game starts in a small window that you can maximize, but there is no fullscreen (or borderless windowed) view available.
The UI is generally clear and intuitive, and most of it (though not all) can be navigated with the mouse. Unfortunately, contrary to point-and-click adventures, the mouse cannot be used to move around or interact with objects. For the latter, you have to approach the object and face it, then press the "interact" key or use an inventory item. This feels rather clunky compared to mouse controls, but didn't cause any problems in my playthrough.
The game provides 9 save slots, but can only be saved in one specific room. Thankfully, saving does not automatically end the day or night. Time does not progress automatically, and there's no hurry except in 3 specific scenes when you're playing hide-and-seek with one of the ghosts.
The fact that I never ran into any bugs adds to the impression of a well-polished product that was designed with care for the user experience.
On a side note, the game is completely free of scares, gore, and vulgar language. It manages to keep a positive outlook despite (obviously) having sad or melancholic parts in most of its stories. With its careful handling of its difficult main theme, it might offer a fine way to introduce the topic of death to young ones.
[h2]5. Conclusion[/h2]
I recommend Corinne Cross's Dead & Breakfast to players who appreciate relaxed, empathic ghost stories. It's very short, but well worth its low cost.
