Developer: Total Mayhem Games
Publisher: Total Mayhem Games
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC
We Were Here Too – Review
We Were Here Too is a true co-op puzzle game, where you need to rely on your partner to solve puzzles and escape an evil castle. It relies on good communication, and to facilitate this, the game offers you in-game voice chat by walkie-talkie: push-to-talk and one at the time. This game is the second installment of the series, the first one is available for free on Steam. It’s a great concept, developed and published by the Dutch indie game studio Total Mayhem Games.
Story
The intro cutscene show a group of explorers in a snowy landscape, discovering an ancient castle. Inside the castle two of the explorers get shut inside, and split up to work their way through the castle, while keeping contact with each other using a walkie-talkie. Of course, the doors they went through, locked shut behind them.
The story of the castle itself is being told by diaries and letters you’ll find in the rooms. It tells about a king whose wife gets secluded after many of their children (including his heirs) have died, and he starts to mistrust everyone, even his own daughters. It seems like he eventually turns mad and performs some kind of dark ritual in order to stay in power.
Graphics
The graphics of the game are real good: the rooms are full of interesting details, which makes you wonder what’s important to solve puzzles, and what’s just decoration. The lighting is rather gloomy and very atmospheric. There’s not much UI clutter, because you’ll simply need to rely on you and your partners wits, look around what you see, and communicate through the walkie-talkie. There’s no inventory, all puzzles have to be solves by interaction with objects around you in the rooms.
Sound
The communication system through the walkie-talkie is actually great, since it’s push-to-talk, and only one person can speak at a time. Because of this you’ll need to wait until the other finished before you can say something, which can be really frustrating (in a good way, adding challenge) if you are about to get squished by a moving wall. This is a fantastic gameplay element!
The environmental sounds and music are really well-done, and enhance the atmosphere. A timed puzzle is usually accompanied by hurried scary music, which really puts you on edge. Every now and then there’s a ghostly voice commenting on your actions too, which sounds cool, but is slightly hard to hear through the in-game voice chat.
Gameplay
We Were Here Too is a puzzle game for two players, which requires you to communicate to solve puzzles together. Each player takes a different route through the castle, and the rooms the players enter are connected through each other by puzzles. One player sees a solution, and the other player needs to solve the puzzle in order to progress. Many puzzles center on recreating what your partner sees. This requires the description of a lot of details, not knowing what is relevant. Usually each room has a few puzzles you’ll need to solve in order to progress to the next room.
There are two roles: the Peasant and the Lord, and your role decides which route you’ll take. The first time you play the game is the most intense, because you’ll have no clue what elements in the rooms are important, and what the puzzle will be exactly. It’s quite easy to die during the first timed puzzles, because you’ll have not enough time to figure out both what elements are important for the puzzle, and complete the correct solution once you realize what you need to do. Luckily, each room is a checkpoint, so you’ll be able to start at the beginning of the room where you died. The type of puzzle will be the same, so you’ll have a head-start, but the solution will differ each time you’ll play through a room. If one player dies, the game is over for both of them.
The puzzles are not that difficult, but the fact that you need to communicate and describe precisely what you see, without knowing what your partner sees, makes the puzzles pretty tricky, because you don’t know which details or objects are important to your partner. Next to that, some rooms have a mechanism which will kill you if you take too long to find a solution, so you’ll really need to think about what you can say in a short time, giving your partner enough time to respond as well. You might get quite stressed out by all of the options before you, unclear descriptions of your partner and limited time, which makes this game a real rush to play together!
There are eight rooms for each player, and you’ll have fun for a few hours to play through all these rooms for the first time. After you’ll finish the game for the first time, you’ll know what the puzzles are in each room, so a second playthrough will be a lot faster and not as exciting as the first time when you still needed to figure out everything. However, in order to get the best ending (and all achievements), you’ll probably going to need a second playthrough. Since each role takes a different route, sees different rooms and experiences the other side of the puzzles, it’s fun to at least experience each role once. Memorizing the solutions for the puzzles won’t work, since the solutions will change each time. You’ll still need your partner to describe the solution to you, in order to solve the puzzles in a room.
This game is probably the most fun if you play with a friend, but if your friend can’t play, there’s also a lobby system to match players. You’ll be able to select language to search for other players who speak the same language as you do, and you can select the room where you want to start.
Conclusion
We Were Here Too is a great game to play with a friend. It feels like a true co-op game, because your friend is not just doing the same thing as you are doing, but he or she is actively helping you, and you’ll need to communicate effectively in order to solve the puzzles. The puzzles are a lot of fun to solve, and have enough diversity. The length of the game is a bit short, but that’s probably fine to keep it from being too much to play through as a team. The graphics and sounds are really well done, and create a nice atmosphere for this game. We Were Here Too is a lot of fun to play, especially for the first time. This game is totally recommended if you have a friend who want to play this game with you, and who likes you enough that they wont be bothered by vague descriptions and a lot of stressed-out yelling at each other!
We Were Here Too - Review,
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