After being shown the trailer for Together BnB by the internet's Patrick Klepek I knew I had to check this game out. The trailer depicts the typical creepy spying on girls dating sim that you see a TON of in VR but then also it showed hunting, driving, and BnB management, an absolutely wild combination. Together BnB is currently in Early Access on Steam for $18 and when they say early they mean EARLY. The plot of the game is that your brother runs this BnB and one day goes missing so the guests find your number and give you a call to come help them out. Now I am not entirely familiar with how BnBs work, especially the ones where the host is also still living in the house. My assumption is it's like a hotel, but in the game, you are expected to be their butler. Get them coffee, make them meals, run errands for them and they expect you to do all of this just because your brother went missing. Odd for sure but in this genre they got to come up with weird reasons to put you in these circumstances.
AURORA Games is the developer behind Together BnB, their last game Together VR is similar in concept but in VR. This is important because I believe that Together BnB either started as a VR project or will become one because not only does the Oculus app launch alongside the game it is required to be open, as closing it will lead to the game crashing. This was the first thing that made me think that something wasn't all there with this game. Upon actually getting into the game you are introduced to the three female guests briefly before being sent off to the stores in town.
The first main task the game gives you is to walk into town and I have to say that walking to town made up for most of my time with the game because IT IS SO SLOW. We are approaching Red Dead Redemption 2 levels of slow here. There is a sprint button, but even that does not alleviate the problem. Upon visiting the three stores in this ghost town you realize that all three shop owners are brothers that have the exact same face and voice with differing hairstyles. Poking around in these stores really gave me a huge shock as something as simple as one potato is $400, that better be one big ass potato. Anyway, it's back to the house in the car that your brother left at the gun shop. The driving is serviceable, but I will warn you there is no in-car map, you can not open the map while in the car and if you get out of the car it will not stop moving.
Upon finding your way back home you run around the property trying to find anyone to talk to, which is not the easiest thing to do. Once you find Emily she will give off some flirty dialogue and say she wants to take a shower but needs baby powder which you need to buy for her. Luckily you can fast travel to the stores and back home, so the trip would not take long. That is unless your game breaks as mine did. Turns out the store had one bottle of baby powder, but it was in the back. After asking Eric to go get it for us and adding it to my cart Eric disappeared, and I was stuck. I tried leaving and coming back, no luck. I ended up having to quit the game, reload and do everything over again, as the game only auto-saved once in my entire time with it.
Once I was back in the game and had the baby powder purchased. I headed back home to give Emily her baby powder, which I was rewarded with 11 favorability points, 100 is needed to invite her to a wine tasting, and 200 to dress up. Shortly after this, a new guest shows up, the first male guest of this fancy BnB. After getting him his keys and going to sleep he rings you up to say that someone called the house and said they knew where my brother was and that I needed to meet them at the blue house out east. I went off on another adventure and when I arrived at the house a black wolf tried to attack me, which I was expected to shoot, but it got bumped by the slowly moving car that I just had hopped out of, killing it instantly. Taking two steps away from the wolf I was greeted with a popup saying that was the entirety of story content in the game currently. Two "missions" is the entirety of the story content in the game so far, and that's what I meant early when I said this game put the early in early access.
Outside of the limited content, the game looks to be coming together nicely. The character models of the girls look good(the guys less so), the outside environments are nice and the nature sounds are pleasing, even if at times overwhelming. There are obvious limitations of the voice actors and localization, as I believe AURORA Games is a Chinese company, which I can easily give some slack. The one thing that I can not really give slack is the performance issues. The game has major framerate issues, and I am not the one to really ever complain about frame rate. At times this game was giving me a headache and might have had something to do with why the game felt so slow. There are some video options on the main menu, and the main menu only, which do not seem to stick in between reloads. Causing me to run the game at 4k when I wanted, for the game's sake, to be running at 1080p; since the options are only on the main menu I could not adjust things as I was playing to try and achieve the best performance that the game would allow.
Together B&Bs trailer got my attention because it showed unique gameplay combinations for what seemed like a standard skeevy dating sim game. From the version of the game that's out in early access, it seems like it will be delivering on those promises. In its current state, though, I can not really recommend Together BnB to anyone. The story content is seriously lacking, the interactions with the girls are almost non-existent and the performance needs some help. One thing of concern is that the developer says on the Steam store page that they are aiming to hit eight total story chapters, two of which are in the game already. If the next six are similar in length to the first two even the final game will have a lack of content, but only time will tell. I am interested enough in this game to keep an eye on development and see where it goes. Here is hoping they finish the game, and it will be worth the price of admission. Oh, and since you are here you would probably want to know that there is no nudity in the game currently. I am not sure if it will be added later or not but currently, you only get to watch the girls shower in their underwear. Sorry!
Comments