We Were Here Together

Play it on: PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One

Current goal: Stay cool, calm, and collected

Recently, a friend and I played through the co-op game We Were Here Too, the second in the We Were Here series, which sees two players split up and have to communicate with each other to make progress as they face a sometimes-deadly assortment of puzzles and traps. I’m not gonna lie, it was pretty stressful! In one section, for instance, I had to quickly describe to my partner what various suits of armor in my chamber were holding so that he could recreate them in his room, all while a wall closed in on me, ready to crush me to death. I got flustered at times, not so much with the game as with myself, when I had to do things I don’t think I’m very good at. At one point, I had to guide my partner through a maze that he was trapped in while I looked down from above; I’m terrible at spatial orientation and really struggled to clearly communicate the path to him. And yet, as uncomfortable as some of the situations made me, I came out grateful for the experience, because we did manage to overcome it in the end, which felt great, and I think sometimes being forced out of your comfort zone by a game can be a good and exciting thing.

This weekend, we’ll probably start tackling that game’s sequel, We Were Here Together. According to howlongtobeat.com, Together is about twice as long as Too, at around 6 ½ hours. That would definitely be too much stress for me to endure in one sitting, so we’ll be splitting it up a bit. If you and a friend are looking for some co-op excitement, perhaps after finishing Split Fiction, and you’re open to something pretty different, I’d probably recommend starting with the shorter We Were Here Too yourselves just to see if this kind of game is your thing.

Oh, and there’s one more thing I want to share about these games. Of course, you and your friend could just hop on a Discord call for unfettered communication while you play, but within the games themselves, your characters have walkie-talkies that make communicating one more thing you have to manage, something that can contribute to the stress and pressure when things get dangerous, because you can’t both be talking at the same time. For my part, I think the friction this generates added something to the experience, and I really enjoyed saying “over” at the end of my comments to let my co-op partner know he could start talking. So I recommend trying the game’s built-in communication system yourselves first if you give the game a shot; if you don’t like it, you can always resort to something else. — Carolyn Petit