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Bear’s Restaurant Review: A Taste of Heaven

3K View2022-05-11

Anyone who’s thought about dying has probably also spent some time thinking about how they’d want to live out their last days. Who would you spend time with? What would you do? And perhaps most importantly—at least for the foodies in the audience like myself—what would you eat for your final meal? My choice would be pizza, obviously.

Bear’s Restaurant is a charming, emotional little adventure game built around that last meal question. You play as Cat, a cat who works as the waiter for a strange little restaurant that appears to be situated upon a bed of clouds. Customers seem to appear out of thin air and disappear just as quickly after being fed any meal that their heart desires. And those meals are prepared by Bear, a jovial bear wearing a chef’s outfit.

What immediately pulled me in to Bear’s Restaurant was its charming aesthetics. The game employs a pixel art style along the lines of a Super Nintendo game. While it doesn’t have a huge number of environments, the places I explored were all supremely detailed and gorgeous. A couple, such as the kaleidoscopic forest I briefly visited in search of mushrooms, really took my breath away. And the strong visuals are aided by equally potent music that swells and soars naturally with the story, as well as sharp, severe sound effects that highlight the game’s darker moments.

Though players are thrown into the scenario without much explanation, it quickly becomes clear just what the titular Bear’s Restaurant is: a final stop for the spirits of the recently deceased before they pass on to the afterlife. Throughout the two to three hours it took me to complete the game, I met a cavalcade of fascinating, troubled souls—from a junk food-obsessed otaku, to a workaholic businessman, to a pregnant mother desperate to meet her baby in the next world. I even had a chance to ready feasts for a few animals, and not the anthropomorphized ones running the restaurant.

Most of Bear’s Restaurant’s gameplay, inasmuch as it counts as gameplay at all, is just walking around a handful of screens, talking to these lonely spirits, and sometimes “diving” into their memories to find out how they died or learn specific details about their desired final meal. The game has a few extremely simple puzzles—so simple that even calling them “puzzles” feels like a bit of a stretch. It’s not a mechanics-driven game in any way, so if you’re not looking for a good story first and foremost, turn away now.

Thankfully, Bear’s Restaurant absolutely delivers on the narrative front. The game is written in simple, clear, effective language that drew me in only to absolutely flatten me with moments of powerful drama and emotion. It has a cheat to easy moments of poignance just given the subject matter; death is both inevitable and tragic, and for most people, it’s easy to find your chest tightening a little when confronted by that.

But Bear’s Restaurant doesn’t rely on cheap sentimentality alone. It covers some extremely heavy subject matter, including suicide and the death of young children, but it does so in a direct manner that honors the seriousness of these issues. And most meaningfully, the game always comes at its characters and their struggles from a place of deep empathy and respect for the complexity of humans. Even more comedic characters like the aforementioned otaku are given added depth through optional dialogue. By the end, I felt that I understood who these spirits were, how their lives played out, and precisely why they deserved a delicious last meal.

Oh, and the power that Bear’s Restaurant places on food really spoke to me as well. Why is it so important for souls to get a hearty final meal of their choice before they move on to heaven? Precisely because food is so meaningful, so central a part of the human experience. For the characters who visit Bear and Cat, food isn’t just about sustenance and survival; food is intrinsically tied to memory, to the highs and lows of the life they are leaving behind.

As the story progresses and a threat to the natural order of things reveals itself, food becomes something even greater. Food morphs into something to look forward to, to strive for, to be thankful for, to remember with fondness. It becomes a symbol of hope itself, a constant reminder of the powerful good that can exist even within a world full of pain.

Bear’s Restaurant reminded me that a truly great meal can take many forms, from a five-course dinner at an expensive restaurant, to sushi lovingly made using fresh-caught fish, to a microwaved bowl of ramen noodles that spark keen memories of sleepovers with elementary school buddies. The warmth and calm that spreads through our bodies when we eat one of these great meals can serve as a sort of spiritual balm, a shield from the hopelessness and despair that comes with knowledge of our own mortality.

Celebrity chef and author Anthony Bourdain once wrote, “Context and memory play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one’s life.” In different interviews given at different times in his career, Bourdain said that his choice for a last meal would be either high-end sushi or roast bone marrow. In 2018, Bourdain died by suicide. Reportedly, one of his final meals was a traditional rural French lunch of roasted ham on a bed of sauerkraut.

I wouldn’t dare fathom a guess whether Bourdain would have enjoyed Bear’s Restaurant; I'm a huge fan of his work, but I have no idea if he played games at all. But I think it’s safe to say that he would have agreed with this game's central message about how meaningful great food is to life, and how everyone deserves to experience that perfect meal from their memory one last time. Playing Bear’s Restaurant left me thinking about death, yes, but also about life, about the memories I have taken for granted and the memories I’d like to create for the future. And yeah, it also got me thinking about food.

SCORE: 4 STARS OUT OF 5

PLAY IF YOU LIKE:

• Life is Strange. Though Square Enix’s adventure game has a more complex narrative and higher-fidelity graphics, if you enjoy that style of emotional story-driven title, you should find something to like in Bear’s Restaurant.

• Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown. Okay, yes, the Anthony Bourdain sidetracks in the review may only be tangential to the game itself. But if you enjoy the attitude towards food expressed by Bourdain in his long-running TV series, then Bear’s Restaurant is likely to speak to you as well.

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