We Were Here Forever

My honest first reaction to We Were Here Forever was mild panic, and I mean that as a compliment. Within the opening chapter, the game has you separated from your partner in parallel prison cells, clutching a walkie-talkie, staring at a puzzle whose solution lives entirely in the other person's room. That asymmetry is the whole game, and Total Mayhem Games has spent four entries perfecting it. At its core this is a strictly two-player, online-only co-op puzzler set inside the cursed world of Castle Rock. You never share a screen, you rarely share a room, and your only real tool is your voice. The walkie-talkie mechanic means only one player can speak at a time, which sounds like a minor inconvenience until you are mid-countdown, your partner is describing a symbol you have never seen in any human language, and you accidentally talk over each other. Most players end up using Discord or party chat instead, which works fine, but it does sand down some of the designed friction. The game runs across six chapters and takes somewhere between 12 and 15 hours to complete on a first run, which is a significant ask for a co-op-only experience. Chapters 3 through 6 can even be tackled in a different order, giving pairs a small amount of agency over the journey. The puzzle design is where the game earns its strong reputation. Early on you are dealing with lever-and-door combinations and code machines, but the game keeps layering in new types: timed floor challenges, rotating hexagon mazes where you watch your partner vanish through a door and have no idea where they will reappear, dimension-swapping traversal sections, and the genuinely legendary Guardian puzzle, which asks one player to interpret abstract creature sounds and relay them to a partner who holds a translation codebook. That particular puzzle is the kind of thing you will talk about long after the credits roll. The art direction and sound design carry weight too: spooky ambience replaces background music in the darker chambers, the castle environments shift from frozen courtyards to underwater sections, and every creak and click feels considered. The atmosphere is dense and intentional, which is exactly the kind of craft I look for. That said, the game is not without real friction. Some puzzle sequences repeat their own premise two or three times in a row, which drains momentum fast. The in-game hint system is widely considered useless, pointing at general area context rather than the specific thing you are stuck on. Checkpoints are sparsely placed in earlier chapters, so a disconnect or a bug can send you back through multi-stage sections you have already solved. There have been reports of connection issues dropping players into limbo with no way to rejoin the session. And a handful of puzzles assign most of the active thinking to one player while the other is essentially waiting, which tilts the workload in ways that feel unbalanced rather than asymmetric by design. Who is this for? Couples, long-distance friends, puzzle enthusiasts who want something meatier than an escape room app. It supports full cross-play between PC and Xbox, so coordinating across platforms is straightforward. New players do not need the earlier games in the series, though there are threads of lore running through that reward anyone who has been along since the beginning. Come in with patience, accept that you will get genuinely, properly stuck at least twice, and you will find a co-op experience that the genre rarely matches in scale or ambition.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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