We Were Here Review: A brief but enjoyable co-op escape room

    These days, a good free co-op game is hard to find, but We Were Here promises a free, asymmetrical co-op escape room experience with a unique communications system to set the experience apart from other games of the genre. Though its graphics lack much appeal and its brief length will be disappointing to some, it still results in a generally well-paced and captivating adventure. We Were Here's payoff is slim with an ending that is funny to some and frustrating to others, but it's all about the journey and it mostly succeeds at building a good escape room, even if its puzzles aren't as nuanced as I'd have liked them to be.

     The game starts out with a short but effective cutscene that sets up the game's hook pretty effectively. You play as one of two travelers, split from the other in a large castle with only a walkie-talkie to communicate with the other traveler. This is about as much of a story as you get with the game, but it's all about the puzzles and the setting is intriguing enough. The two travelers to choose from are the librarian, who solves the individual puzzles, and the explorer, who executes the solutions to those puzzles and tells the librarian what the puzzle is to begin with. Despite the names, I actually found the librarian to have a much more interesting role compared to the explorer, as with the explorer you spend a lot of time waiting for the librarian to find the right symbol on the back of a book to solve the actual puzzle. The dynamic always works well between the two but the waiting can be quite boring at times with a more complicated puzzle.

    One of the main hooks to its gameplay is its communications system, which has the two players using push-to-talk walkie talkies where only one player can speak at a time. This sounds like a bad system, but it adds a lot to the overall atmosphere of the game and it creates an added challenge of organization between the two players. The separation of both players is pretty much the only unique thing the game does, and the only real draw of the game besides the overall level of polish. My playthroughs of the game were without any technical hiccups or bugs, which impressed me considering that it was made by a smaller dev. 

    If I had to name the weak point of the game it has to be its presentation. Low quality sound effects and an uninteresting art style are noticeable, but I don't think it detracts anything from the core elements of the game. At some point, there's no reason to care about bad quality sound effects when you have the comforting sound of the radio static of a walkie talkie when your partner forgot to let go of the talk key. It's a simple game in both its mechanics and its complexity, but its super fun to play and ultimately an enjoyable escape room. 

    The puzzles are the most important part to a game like this, and I can confidently say that this game delivers with its puzzles. Although a few of them seem incredibly standard and uninteresting, an equal amount are interesting in both theme and execution. A particular standout would be one involving "recreating a play" and another one recreating the shortest game of chess. They're all well done and the setting of all of them are interesting, although there is one navigational puzzles that just wasn't interesting enough to justify some of the frustration caused by it.

    Overall, We Were Here is a well-polished escape room with enough intrigue and interesting puzzles to justify the 2-3 hour length. Though its presentation remains disappointing at times and the explorer role has too much waiting involved, it still remains to be a fun co-op puzzle game. If I had to give it a rating, I'd give it a 7.5/10 and a recommendation to anyone looking for a good free co-op game to play with a friend.