My big goal for last year, and continuing into this year, was to play more games. I fell into a rut a few years back of just not expanding what I spend my time with. I played whatever I was working on, of course, and the games called out for reference or touchstones but that was it.
I’m happy to report that I played a lot of games last year—especially toward the end—and, even though 2026 started with challenges—I’m not letting that stop me and am continuing to dive into games that pique my interest. So, preamble done, let’s move into the meat here and talk about a little gem I’d been meaning to play for a while and am glad I finally made time to do so.
This Bed We Made is a narrative adventure game set in 1950s Montreal. You are Sophie Roy, a maid at the Clarington Hotel who can’t help but get wrapped up in the lives of the people who stay there. Whether Sophie is a good housekeeper is up to you but, no matter what, she is an excellent snoop. The game is all about routing through hotel rooms, looking through other people’s belongings, talking to other members of the hotel staff, and piecing together the clues over a larger mystery. Taking place over a single wintry night, you will become embroiled in a tale of love, deception, and dark deeds while you clean mirrors, make beds, and decide which bits of evidence to keep out and which to throw away. The setting, tone, characters, and writing all converge in a poetic noir-tinged tale in a capsule-sized but beautifully-realized world.
The game is built on the foundation of choices matter. I can’t speak to the narrative flowchart that underpins this game but I can speak to the player experience. I legit fretted over whether or not to toss something in the garbage, whether I had left something out in the open or not, and I was disappointed when I realized I had made a mistake I swore I wouldn’t make. I considered each dialogue choice carefully and wanted to make sure I protected the folks I wanted to keep safe. In the end, even with some failures on my part, I was still completely satisfied with the story and wanted to play it again.
And, at around 4.5 hours per playthrough, you can play it again to make other choices—some big and some small—to see how the story adapts to your decisions.
The first game by Montreal-based Lowbirth Games, This Bed We Made makes for an impressive debut. It is exactly the type of game I drift toward. It has one big idea, a setting you don’t see often, and it wears its passion on its sleeve. A game about a snooping maid in mid-century Canada who isn’t secretly an assassin or superhero isn’t going to get a nine-figure budget and thank goodness for that. These games should be small. They should be focused. They should bear the charm of each hand that helped create it. And This Bed We Made does just that.
If any of the above sounds interesting to you, I encourage you to give it a try. As of this post, the game is 40% off over on Steam and Xbox (and also on PlayStation at full-price) but, even if it isn’t on sale when you see this, throw some money at these devs. They just—mere days after I played their first game—announced a new one called Lost & Found. This short-form followup to This Bed We Made sees Sophie as a hostess on a cruise liner in the 1960s and I can’t want to check out.
