🔥 We Were Here Forever "An Honest Opinion" 🔥 @WeWereHereGame #IndieGame #GameDev

It’s with a heavy heart that I put pen to paper for this review. I don’t think it’s right to review a game without having at least seen the credits. After all, there are too many titles that start with a bang and end up sputtering out in a haze of dull repetition. 

But I didn’t get to the end of We Were Here Forever. 

Hell, I didn’t even get close. 

Here’s why.

This sumptuous co-op adventure comes via Dutch developer Total Mayhem Games, who’ve spent the last few years slowly carving out a niche in co-op first-person puzzlers. The most prominent example is Portal 2’s co-op mode and the more recent It Takes Two, in which players must work in sync to solve problems that’d be insurmountable alone.

My girlfriend and I had a fun time playing Portal 2 together during the pandemic lockdown, we both enjoy the occasional bout of co-op gameplay and gaming together is always fun... So why not sign up to We Were Here Forever and enjoy some quality time together?

First impressions are great. You pick your way through atmospheric environments in which each player gets half the experience. For example, one player might need a series of symbols to unlock a door, though only the other is able to see them. You’ve got to describe them through voice chat (or yell them down the hall if you’re in the same house) and the other player can proceed.

Things rapidly snowball in complexity, with linked contraptions that have effects on the other, figuring out ways to transport items around a map, or simply figuring out where to go next.

The only problem is - and I by no means lay this at Total Mayhem’s door - is that trying to play We Were Here Forever just resulted in terrible arguments between me and my partner. Something here just rubbed us up the wrong way and after a few attempts that ended with general bad vibes between us, we decided to call it a day.

I don’t exactly know why We Were Here Forever drove us mutually crazy where other co-op games haven’t but we didn’t want to play much more of it to find out.

And that’s the frustrating (and early) conclusion. 

On paper this should be a home run: it looks great, is clearly crammed full of brilliant moments (I wistfully watched a long play to see what I was missing), and is clearly a labour of love. 

But no game is worth sacrificing domestic bliss for. We’re currently having much better luck with the much less stress-inducing Kirby and the Forgotten World.

No score