What I Wish I Knew Before Restarting Bear & Breakfast

I started playing Bear & Breakfast last week and learned that you can, in fact, lose at this cozy management sim set in the woods.

Let’s get one thing straight: I am not good at video games. I don’t pretend I’m good at them either. That is unless it is Nonogram Galaxy. Any kind of puzzles made for old people to do while eating porridge. I fuck those right up.

However, I don’t let that stop me from playing them because I love video games! So when I went into Bear & Breakfast, I wasn’t expecting my tendency to be a smooth-brained stinker to create any sort of issue. But, boy, was I wrong!

What did I do then? How did I lose Bear & Breakfast, resulting in me having to start a new game after an hour of playing?

How to lose Bear & Breakfast (not really)

I was very excited to play Bear & Breakfast. So excited that I jumped right into getting my AirB(ear)nB looking good.

I picked up every plank of wood and piece of garbage I saw and tidied everything up. I rebuilt the crafting table and talked to all the NPCs not involved in my main quest. This was all before I met Tony the Beaver, the old fella that would help me build my human-holding shack.

After making an incredibly manipulative contractual agreement with a blow-up shark, I went to Sawdust. I spoke to Tony, who I’m convinced wants to bone my sweet mother, Margaret. That has nothing to do with my gameplay, except I think it made me trust him a little bit less (You’re not my real dad Tony, and you will NEVER be my real dad).

Nevertheless, he agreed to help me fix up the dilapidated structure. Thus began my downward spiral.

i have already fucked up in bear and breakfast by using all my money to buy blueprints instead of building the first room of the bear and breakfast. if this doesnt tell you i am bad at video games, idk what will

— weird girl ruby innes (@rubyinnes) July 29, 2022

Once you clean all the shit out of your Bear & Also Breakfast shack (something I had already done), Tony will commend you on it. He is clearly trying to butter you up so he can kiss your mother on the mouth, but I digress. Completing the clean-up part of the tutorial will open up the Pawn Voyage shop, which sells blueprints for shack furniture.

This is where I pissed the bed. Not the actual bed, the theoretical bed. My motel does not come with the beds pre-pissed in. The patrons have to do that themselves, and we charge extra for clean-up.

You already get a bed blueprint automatically, but it’s ass. It’s no good. So when I saw that the Pawn Voyage store had a nicer bed available and some other stuff, I took what I could get to start my shmoe-tel the right way.

The only problem was that there was no way to make any money at this point. You can’t sell stuff anywhere. Your poor mother gave her favourite little bubby a reasonable 250 coins, and her stupid little bubby blew it all on blueprints.

So when I had these blueprints and went to make my first bedroom in the shack, I realised that the minimum price to build a room was 60 coins. I had 50.

There I was, running to every corner of these thick, juicy woods, trying to find any way to get some money. But I’m a fucking bear. Can I not steal some shmuck’s wallet after he soils himself from seeing a fucking bear?

Nobody wanted pictures of my bear feet (no, autocorrect, I did NOT mean bare feet). Nobody was willing to throw coins in my direction. There wasn’t even a travelling circus to which I could sell my labour for peanuts and lifelong psychological damage.

That was it. I lost. So what did I learn from this experience?

Pro tip: Ask your mummy for help (or just follow the tutorial)

After restarting the game because I genuinely couldn’t figure out what to do at that point, I ended up having a great time on my second playthrough and even streamed 3 hours of it on Twitch. Although I forgot to enable VODs, this is the only evidence that exists.

It seems like I also wasn’t alone in this failure, as the team from Gummy Cat made a post on Steam called ‘Known Issues and How To Fix Them‘, which included my little problem:

I ran out of money and can’t progress

If you run out of money before you’re able to set up a steady income through building bedrooms and accepting guests, follow these steps:

1. If you are under 100 coins, visit Margaret, your mom in Thicket. She will provide you with some extra pocket money.

So that’s it. If you spend all your money, you have to ask for help from mummy. She will give you a little bit of chump change, rewarding you for your stupidity. I luckily did not delete my first savefile, so I went back in and ran home to mummy, and the sweet mother bear gave me some dosh.

However, if you would like to avoid this option and keep your poor mother blissfully unaware of your financial folly, just follow the tutorial. Don’t be silly with your money; once you start making money from the cowardly flesh creatures, go nuts. Do whatever you want.

To conclude, all I can say is this: don’t throw your coins at the nefarious balloon shark until there’s a bit of chump change coming back your way. If you do, run home to your mummy. She will help you, and also suggest that you learn how to read.