“Even the most put-together person could be an absolute mess on the other side of the door.” Nobody understands the gravity of this statement more than This Bed We Made’s beloved snoop and dirty-laundry detective, Sophie Roy. She built quite the reputation for herself since the famed incidents at The Clarington Hotel, to such a degree that she is apparently invited back in Lost & Found: A This Bed We Made Story to touch more hearts…and personal effects. If you enjoyed the first game and want even more opportunity to be nosy, the sequel will be an absolute treat. If Lost & Found will be your first entry point into Sophie’s life story, then you are also in luck because I believe it to be a tighter, tidier experience than its predecessor.
Lost & Found opens with Sophie Roy taking a seat across the desk from a well-dressed, cheerful man holding a clipboard. Fans of the original game will likely note that this is a sharp but colorful turn from the interrogation that started her first adventure. Instead, with all of that drama behind her, she is interviewing for a stewardess position aboard a luxury ocean liner. Many of her skills as a hotel maid are transferable to this new role, but her housekeeping proficiency is only a small part of what makes Sophie the perfect gal for the job. After a short introduction, the game shows us why Sophie is really on this ship, to snoop on the guests and find a thief hiding among them.
The story in Lost & Found is largely self-contained, laser-focused around a simple investigative mission, and boasts a more concentrated script than what we saw in This Bed We Made. While some folks may be bothered by the simplicity of Lost & Found, the game ends up a much more succinct and satisfying experience because the plot did not meander or lose its red thread for even a moment. Moreover, the pacing is uniformly interesting throughout its 3-hour runtime, which I could not say about the first game, and by the end I felt like all the loose ends were tied up in a nice petite bow. I love when an indie game knows precisely what it wants to be, and in the case of Lost & Found, it seems like Lowbrith Games was able to hone in on what makes their brand of storytelling so special; it’s incredible intimacy.
You can learn a lot about a person from the things that they treasure. Sophie Roy knows this well, and players will help guide her prying eyes through every nook and cranny of the cabins as she tries to uncover the thief aboard the Orpheus. Much of the gameplay loop is the same from This Bed We Made, giving players the chance to scrub bathrooms, make beds, deliver towels, and tidy up each accommodation as they investigate the occupants. This time around, however, Sophie will also perform her duties as a stewardess, which includes delivering telegrams to the guests and serving coffee/tea. I appreciated that Lowbrith Games provided an opportunity for face-to-face interaction with the guests on board the Orpheus, something that was missing from This Bed We Made. This made for much more personable encounters with the guests and helped develop their character arcs in more dynamic ways beyond the environment storytelling layers we get from exploring their rooms.
Each cabin you visit in Lost & Found is a diorama of peculiar objects that tell the outlandish tales of their owners, and what’s more, each of these subplots was expertly written. We see Sophie build relationships with a diverse cast of personalities, even though her encounters with them are brief. Sophie’s character also grows in beautiful ways in response to knowing her patrons at a deeper level, giving players a chance to shape her values via several “choices-matter” junctions in the script. The conclusion of the experience is heartwarming, which was not something I expected after playing This Bed We Made, and left me feeling quite attached to Sophie Roy and her motivations. The game delivers beat after beat of engaging scenarios, including a delightful role-reversal towards the end of the game, further proving how well this concise experience is packaged up for the player.
Since I played Lost & Found on the heels of finishing This Bed We Made, I noticed a few other quality-of-life improvements that many players may not recognize. First of all, Sophie’s walking speed has been dramatically improved, fixing an issue I had with the first game whereby it would take far too long for me to shuffle back and forth across the hotel when the game required me to retrace my steps. Secondly, players no longer have to select the different parts of an object to clear or tidy; the game removed that step in the user flow in favor of automatically selecting the next part to clean. It’s a very small tweak, one that I may not have noticed if I didn’t have the first game in recent memory, but it demonstrated a concerted effort on the part of Lowbirth Games to smooth out the gameplay that was introduced in the first game.
Despite how critical I have been about This Bed We Made, I want to make it abundantly clear that I hold a special fondness for the original game; moreover, I am overjoyed that Lowbrith Games took the best parts of that formula and perfected them in the sequel. Lost and Found expands on the compelling premise of the first game, adding even more layers of depth to the simple routine of tidying while simultaneously discovering the secrets hiding in people’s stuff. While the crime is not at the center of the experience in either game, they both orbit around the interweaving and overlapping stories of the people caught up in those central mysteries, even if only by proximity.
As far as negatives go, there is not much I have to add. I wish there were manual saves in the game to prevent players from losing progress if they need to set the game down for a bit. Also, the animations are stiff, and the lip sync to the voice acting is off, though vastly improved from the first game. I also would have liked Lost & Found to lean into the ASMR qualities of cleaning even more than they did, which seems to be an untapped superpower of the game design. Hearing the sponge scrub against the porcelain tub, or the rustle of the sheets as they are folded, adds a lovely sonic quality to the task, but there are too few and far between all the moments of relative silence.
