We Were Here

Drew has pledged to slowly but slowly churn his way through his sizeable stack of games for his ‘Beat the Backlog’ feature. Check out his main article to see what games he’s completed already!

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It feels like cheating adding We Were Here to my Beat the Backlog feature since I only bought the series bundle on Steam a few months ago, but after the mammoth task of completing Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch, I was very ready for a quick win to get me back into the swing of things. 

As with We Were Here Forever and We Were Here Expeditions: The FriendShip, I linked up with fellow VGamingNews writer, Gaz Jones, to stumble and argue our way through this collaborative asymmetric puzzler, since we both enjoyed the later entries so much. 

Quickly giving us a sense of deja vu, things didn’t get off to a great start…

Immediately, we found that creating a room and inviting your pal in-game leads to serious audio problems -as in, you and your partner are entirely unable to hear each other- something of a killer for a game built around communication between players. Thankfully there is a workaround by sending a friend invite directly through Steam, but even that was hit and miss, requiring a few restarts before we could successfully hear each other. And then, some 30 minutes into our game, we each began to sound like Daleks for a phase before the chat cut out entirely, requiring us to restart the session and lose our progress to that point. Now, I will concede that the game came out in 2017, so it’s expected to be somewhat rough around the edges, but the voice chat not working consistently was a big pain in the arse. (The saving grace here is that the game is free, and while that shouldn’t be an excuse for functionality not to work, it does make you more patient with the whole thing.)

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At A Glance

WE WERE HERE
Date Added to Backlog	27/09/2023
Price Paid	£0.00
Positives	+ Fun visual style + Entry level puzzles to encourage new fans + An interesting retrospective at the start of an excellent franchise
Negatives	– Severe audio issues, requiring multiple restarts – Puzzles too simple for experienced players – A little too ‘toy box-y’; lacking in atmosphere
Recommendation	5 /10
Played On	PC
Also Available On	PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One
Find out about our scoring policy here.

Want to see the whole of Drew’s backlog? Check it out here and suggest something to play over on our socials!

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Chat issues aside, looking at We Were Here, you can clearly see the strands of DNA that start in this inaugural entry and continue to run all the way through to the latest games in the franchise. The intro is made up of hand drawn storyboards that are a significantly lower budget version of the engaging set-ups that Total Mayhem Games would bring to life later on. The visuals too, while lacking the playful chunkiness that would become the trademark style, are very similar, and offer fun and characterful environments for you to explore.

Getting into the meat of the gameplay, you can almost feel the tentative first steps into puzzle design, with almost neon-flashing clues to help you solve the first few, just in case you become impatient or frustrated too soon. A certain level of simplicity runs the span of the game, which Gaz and I finished a couple of times over about three hours. I wouldn’t say we were challenged by any of the puzzles until the very last one, and I guess that is something of a double-edged sword. On one hand, We Were Here rightly acts as a fantastic introduction to the asymmetric puzzle genre and should encourage new players to seek out more of the same, but for more experienced players, there isn’t too much to tax your brain. Horses for courses, I suppose.

Now, that final puzzle I mentioned is important beyond just offering a nice crescendo from a puzzle-solving standpoint, it also feels like a real launch point for another element that makes the We Were Here franchise so enjoyable – an excellent sense of atmosphere. For the most part, this first entry feels a little bit like playing in the developers’ toy box; they’ve created very bespoke items and scenarios to fit the needs of the puzzles and it’s clear that you’re running through a very manufactured scenario. Something of a spoiler alert, the final puzzle is a very cool scene that asks you to accurately dress a theatre stage before a terrifying marionette monster has time to creep up and kill you, and this was the first time I felt a real connection with the characters, and a sense of urgency to solve the riddle before our adventure was ended. 

Sure, there are plenty of puzzles that can kill you before this one, but this was the first real example of Total Mayhem Games building a very palpable sense of atmosphere to go alongside the puzzle solving – clearly paving the way for some of the excellent tension later showcased in We Were Here Forever. Gaz and I have pledged to play the sequel, We Were Too, very soon, and I’m genuinely excited to see how the success of this last level might seep into the next game in series, offering a more rounded and adventurous experience.

In a vacuum, it’s hard to recommend the original We Were Here –  it may be free, but it’s plagued by audio issues throughout and is decidedly simpler than the newer entries, inviting entirely the wrong kind of headache. But from the perspective of the franchise as a whole, it does offer a cool window into the origins of We Were Here, and it’s obvious that the seeds of many great ideas are already beginning to take root in this initial entry, shaky though it is. 

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