We Were Here Forever, the tried and true of a cooperative escape room adventure
We Were Here Forever
Total Mayhem Games returns with a new game from the We Were Here series, a saga of co-operative puzzle-escape room games that test our skills of reasoning, interpretation as well as coordinating with a second player. Don't worry if you've never played a previous chapter, though, because We Were Here Forever isn't directly linked to its predecessors.Let's not waste time and see what we think after trying We Were Here Forever .
Co-op
A prison from We Were Here Forever We and our companion are lost within the realm of Castle Rock. Our task is simple to understand: escape. But being able to do it is another story altogether. As mentioned, the plot of We Were Here Forever is not directly connected with the previous chapters, but is part of the same narrative universe (there is also a series of live-action videos called We Were Here Stories: Chronicles of Castle Rock). >What matters, however, is the cooperative play structure, at the heart of all the game mechanics. In We Were Here Forever we will have to coordinate with our adventure companion: the actions to be carried out are often simple, such as collecting fundamental objects for progress (for example keys to open doors) but also elements necessary to complete puzzles or activate machinery necessary to move.
Obviously, it is also necessary to solve puzzles, which require coordinated work. Each player must assume a role and perform a certain action in response to that of his partner or according to information that only the other can see. An easy example is one of the very first puzzles of the demo: a player is faced with a machine, a sort of slot machine that automatically shows five symbols, every few seconds, associated with other five figures. The second player, who is on the back of the machine, must ask which symbol has appeared in a specific position and press the relevant button, before the time runs out. Repeated the operation a certain number of times, you get the tools you need to advance.
The difficulty level can change a lot between one sequence and the next, especially because - unlike a puzzle game with rooms like Portal or The Talos Principle - the logical structure of each puzzle changes completely and before you can even find the solution you have to understand how to interpret the clues. For the moment we can't discuss too much about the level of difficulty and the variety of the puzzles, though, because the game is much wider than what we tried, so there will be space and time, in the final version, to understand if We Were Here Forever is an easy, complex and varied game. It will be even more important to determine if the difficulty level will be regular or if there will be sudden blocks or unclear sections.
Clues
We will also have a flashlight in We Were Here Forever An escape adventure room can be easy or difficult, depending on which audience you want to reach, but it's important that it maintains a clear direction all the time and doesn't block players with less logical and less clear-cut puzzles. We are insisting on this hypothetical situation as we have noticed what could be a problem in the final version: the clue system.We Were Here Forever proposes a set of three clues for each play area. It is possible to unlock one every thirty seconds, without any penalty. The problem is that these clues are basically useless. We have tried them in various areas, even in areas where we have already figured out the solution, and on average the clues say things like "Look around", "You have to interact with the environment", "You have to do something in a specific order" and so on.
These are clues that do not make it any clearer what to do and, in case you find yourself stuck, reading all three suggestions in the area has no effect on our level of understanding of the enigma in progress. We are pretty certain that a player who purchases a cooperative puzzle-escape room adventure will on average understand that if he has a red key and there is a door with a huge red lock, maybe the two are connected and the clue. "Each door has its own key" perhaps not useful.
Our hope is that the clues in the area of the tried were not definitive or that in other areas there are more direct clues.
A We Were Here Forever cemetery In this test we noticed a second element that left us a bit in doubt: the internal voice chat. We Were Here Forever offers integrated voice chat, which is important if you decide to play with a stranger online. However, we already feel we should advise against this choice. Beyond the potential problem of the language barrier, cooperating with a stranger in an escape room game is likely to be more frustrating than anything else, since there is no understanding necessary to coordinate and divide the tasks to be performed.
The real problem, in any case, is that the voice chat is a walkie-talkie with push-to-talk function and proximity system (from neighbors you can hear without using the walkie-talkie, but a wall is enough to be blocked ). When you are apart, you have to press the right mouse button to speak. Also, if you talk to the other player at the same time, you cancel each other out and you don't hear what the other player wants to say. The idea of the walkie-talkie is pleasant and appropriate to the type of adventure and setting, but in practice we found ourselves hating it in a few minutes and we moved on to the Steam chat. It is too easy to block each other out or start talking by forgetting to press the right button to activate the communication, which wastes additional time and increases the potential frustration.
Let's be clear, it's a false problem (which also existed in previous games), as it solves effortlessly in an instant using the Steam chat (or PlayStation or Xbox, of course), but we are sorry that a game mechanic has to be circumvented. Having reached the fourth chapter of the saga, perhaps it would have been good to find a different way for players to communicate internally in an alternative but still efficient way.
We Were Here Forever is a cooperative puzzle escape room adventure, which promises to expand as proposed by the previous chapters. Fans of the saga will know what to expect and in this tried it we have been confirmed that the style of the game has not been completely revolutionized. Doubts remain about the clue system and the internal management of the voice chat. Furthermore, it is impossible to understand the actual difficulty level until we have the full version in our hands.
