We Played it Twice! Was it good? We Were Here Forever Review

Check out our review video here!

Have you ever thought to yourself, “What if I was trapped in a spooky castle with my best friend, and we had to solve a ton of brain-mushing puzzles to escape?” If you have, then you are probably a little off your rocker! But, oh, do we have a game for you! 

We Were Here Forever is a brilliant asymmetrical co-op adventure, which in more simple terms means that you both have different information on your screens and you need to share it with one another to solve puzzles and progress through the game! Because of this, it is online-only, though we chose to play it in our living room sitting across from each other, instead of getting a divorce and moving into two different apartments, just to play a game! 

Burdened with nothing but two walkie-talkies for communication purposes, the two of you must roam the castle and courtyard to solve intricate puzzles that seem only to get more and more complex as you progress through the game's 10-12 hour campaign! Or at least 12 hours is what we were told…. But according to steam, we have 18.5 hours in the game right now…. And well, that's a story about HERALD! We will get to him in a minute! 

The game has a very enthralling atmosphere, from the art to the puzzles and the story! We really felt like we were there! HAHA…. (title of the next game?) Anyway…. We felt like we were the ones trying desperately to escape only to run into yet another obstacle and creepy storytelling segment! Which surprisingly enough did not bother me at all like story cutscenes normally do in games! 

We were readily aware of the consequences of making the wrong decision, whether it was about what grave we should dig up, or stepping on the wrong piece of the puzzle! The story, while eerie enough to keep us on our toes, was not so scary or horror-esque that we did not want to keep playing! And while we occasionally had the privilege to roam about freely together, more often than not we were separated and occasionally might hear a gasp, or a scream from the other as something creepy happened on their screen! 

The puzzles in the game varied from odd obscure symbols we had to describe to one another, to describing what odd things I was seeing underwater so that Ririe could know what he should do! And yes we are trying to be a little cryptic so that we don’t spoil anything for you. The puzzles continue to get more and more complex to the point where some of them throw a lot of information at you all at once! You definitely end up scratching your head here and there, but when you solve the puzzles you will always realize just how simple it actually was! Well, most of the time. 

Communication is a vital skill to employ in this game. Missing one simple detail of what you see on your side might mean the difference between a two-minute puzzle and a ten-minute puzzle! While the puzzles were rarely so hard that they made us want to rage quit, they are tough enough to make you think and use your brain's computing power! Speaking of computing power, you remember Herald? Yeah, Herald is this dinky little blue computer we bought 3 years ago to help Ririe with online classes, but he was never meant for gaming! Ririe was kind enough to give me Herald for the majority of the playthrough, and he sucks! Herald, not Ririe! So, like we said, we were literally playing this game forever partially because Herald decided to freeze and have a freaking seizure at important moments, and partially because of a few game bugs that were absolutely infuriating. 

Okay, yeah we know you are not here to hear but Herald, but just trust me he is crucial to this story! While our other laptop is meant more for editing than gaming, it still did the game far more justice than Herald ever could! With a 100 percent color accurate screen the game looked absolutely gorgeous! For the most part, our nicer computer ran the game well, and we had little qualms, but there were of course problems that were not Herald’s fault. 

We were given early access to the game, and had intended to release a review on release day, but now we are about a week late and that is because we had trouble with the auto save feature! There is no way to save manually, which in and of itself was an issue for us since we have a kid and lead busy lives. We hated having to either solve a puzzle or restart from a previous checkpoint later if we had to leave! We never knew when the game was gonna save, and that was a problem. 

The fact that we could not save manually was not only an issue because we had to leave now and then, but also because the autosave didn't work all the time…. After playing the game for four hours in one sitting we finished a puzzle and waited for the game to do what we thought was save before hopping off. But upon returning we found that our progress had not been saved…. 

This along with Herald’s frequent seizures and one instance where we solved a puzzle incorrectly and had to reboot the game to try again resulted in our 18.5 hours of gameplay in a game that most likely would have taken us 8-10 hours if everything had run smoothly. And we have yet to play the finale because, as we said, Herald kept freaking out just before we got to the auto save and we had to keep playing the middle three chapters over again due to the autosave not working. 

After being forced to replay a large portion of the game's puzzles numerous times, I’d definitely say there is not much replay value, to begin with. But that is not really a problem, because despite how terribly the game ran on Herald and how much trouble we had with the autosave, we really enjoyed our main playthrough of the game. The first time through every puzzle and area was enjoyable, and I was continually saying how much I liked the game while playing on the incredibly unqualified computer! That is until I found out how well it ran on Ririe’s computer, at which point we had to continually swap to keep things equal. 

The point to all this, is that if a game can be so thoroughly enjoyed despite such glaring problems, then it’s a good game. Maybe just wait until a couple of patches come out. Honestly, we have not heard anyone else complaining about the autosave feature, so who knows, maybe we are just idiots!

If you would like to try this game for yourself, you can pick it up here: https://totalmayhemgames.com/games/we-were-here-forever/
We love you guys! Y’all are awesome!