"Alright Miss Roy, I need you to tell me everything that happened, starting with this morning."
— Detective Maurice Tremblay
This Bed We Made is a Third Person Noir Cozy Mystery game by Lowbirth Games, released November 1st, 2023. In it, you play Sophie Roy, a maid at an upscale hotel in 1958 Montreal, cleaning up her designated floor after a particularly busy Valentine's Day weekend. Cleaning one of the guest rooms, you discover that he's been spying on Sophie, and has photographic evidence of her entertaining herself by digging through guests' belongings. What follows is a rollercoaster of intrigue, blackmail, romance, and even murder, and the fate of those involved rests on Sophie's shoulders.
This Bed We Made contains examples of:
- Amateur Sleuth: Sophie is just a maid, but if she fails to fully crack the case before the end of her shift, the real culprit of Mr. Cruz's murder gets away with it, and either Paul or Marcella and Anne end up being convicted instead. It's also only through Sophie's actions that all of the gay characters can escape without being outed.
- Chekhov's Gun: Sophie knowing the name of the the gay bar Anne frequents is revealed to be one towards the end.
- Closet Gay: There are at least four secretly gay characters in the hotel on this particular day: Anne, Marcella, Paul, Beth and, possibly, Sophie. Depending on Sophie's actions, Anne, Marcella, and Paul could all be outed by the police.
- Cozy Mystery: The vast majority of the game is Sophie just trying to untangle the complicated lives of the guests staying on her floor of the hotel, and figure out why one of them was spying on her, until the very end, when one of them is murdered. The stakes become not only deadly serious, but even the suspects that are proven innocent could still have their lifes ruined by being outed as gay during the investigation.
- First Girl Wins: Anne and Marcella fell in love with each other in college and the main mystery is revealed to be about them reconnecting and running away together. Whether they succeed is up to the player.
- He Who Must Not Be Seen: Except for the ending slides, Paul, Marcella and Anne are never seen on screen.
- How We Got Here: The story opens up with Sophie being brought in by the police to answer questions about what happened at the hotel and the game is framed as a flashback before she answers her questions.
- Police Are Useless: If Sophie doesn't deliberately lead them to the right answer by destroying evidence that could distract them, the police investigator will pin the blame on one of the innocent suspects for being "deviant".
- Shout-Out: The title of the book Paul is reading ("And They Were Roommates") is a reference to a famous Vine.
- The basic set up of the books of Brigitte Boswell (lesbian pulp novels with happier endings than most written by a real life lesbian seems to be a reference to Patricia Highsmith and her book The Price of Salt. Bernard, Sophie’s boss, repeatedly misnames her as “Ms. Belivet,” a reference to the protagonist of said book.
- Wham Shot: The game, up until the final minutes, is pretty sedate and the resolutions to the mysteries pretty tame. Then you see Mr. Cruz's body at the elevator.
