Topic: We Were Here Together

I stumbled upon We Were Here Together on steam without having played any first-person puzzle games before. The steam page portrays it as a two-person puzzle adventure game, where you roamed around a “Castle Rock” in first-person solving a myriad of challenges. Aesthetically it was clean, polished, and felt timeless to a degree. The cold, crisp blue snowing exterior initially left me curious about the tone of the game. Still, as I scroll, the warm orange interiors of what appeared to be a haunted mansion brought back a sense of adventure that immediately grabbed my attention. At this point, it’s fair to say I was put off by it being a dedicated puzzle game as this isn’t my typical choice of degree. But believe me, I’m delighted I did.

You open in an antarctic outpost where your fellow explorers appear to be missing. Eerie music leaves you a bit on edge. The entire setting makes you unsure of what direction the game is going to take. The story, pacing, and mechanics are all still a mystery. A lone radio signal crackles, Someone is in distress. Nothing but this peculiar cabin and surrounding frozen wasteland stand in the way of you responding to the foreboding call for help. The controls feel good; I never thought it necessary to look up a particular mapping or was frustrated when interacting with something. There is an inventory system, but it’s light and straightforward, which perfectly fits the puzzle mechanics.

A sense of community is the essence of taking even a fantastic experience and bringing it to this high immersion level that makes video games such a unique experience. Developers have a history of knowing this and, in an attempt to capture it, often force a player to perform social interactions. A crappy stand on two pressure plates to open the door puzzle in the middle of an otherwise excellent dungeon always leaves me with a sense of pandering. We Were Here Together is none of these. It’s fundamentally designed from the ground up not only to require you to work together, but to make you want to work together. It’s not that you couldn’t play this on your own; it’s captured better by recognizing the game is better with a good friend.

As you depart the Outpost and work your way towards the Keep We Were Here Together, nails every tone it sets out to capture.

The puzzles built on each other regarding the communication skills it was steering you towards, and it still had a perfect balance of diversity and curiosity for what challenges lay ahead. There was a masterstroke in balancing when it came to how much you actively needed to work out yourself and what required you to communicate with your partner to solve—often allowing you to work out 90% of the puzzle but still requiring critical information from your partner. While simultaneously having an alternative mirrored version of the same challenge for your partner solve. This symmetry prevented one person from falling behind or getting ahead in their progression.

I had a wholesome, almost emotional sense of accomplishment for most of the puzzles that I didn’t expect. Everything they managed to pack into a perfectly paced 5-hour session left me with no suggestions or wishful thinking in what the game could have been.

In Summary

Even if you don’t usually play puzzle games, I’d recommend this wholeheartedly. Do yourself a favor and give it a play.