Gaz and I have been a little bit obsessed with the We Were Here series since we tried out the latest full instalment, We Were Here Forever, back in July 2022. Since then, we’ve been blessed with the incredible Expeditions: The FriendShip and have taken a foray through the back catalogue to see the series’ inception. Keen to introduce the games to a whole new audience, Total Mayhem Games recently released the first three games on Nintendo Switch, with the third entry, We Were Here Together, high-pointing the trio. Excited to finally put a bow on things, Gaz and I fired up our Switches to take our walkie-talkies mobile!
For those who aren’t familiar with the series, We Were Here is an exclusively co-op puzzle game, where players have to work together to overcome tricky conundrums to traverse fantastical dungeons. The game is designed as an asymmetric experience, meaning that each player gets a unique level. Things are designed so that each person only has half of the information or gadgets that they need to solve the puzzle, and you have to communicate what you can see and do to your partner through your trusty old walkie-talkie. It takes quick thinking and precise communication to get to the bottom of some of the puzzles, and the escape room-style collaboration is what makes the games so much fun.
Our experiences with the initial two games showed us that the beginnings of We Were Here were relatively humble, but We Were Here Together shows itself to be a very different animal within the opening 10 seconds. The intro is delivered by way of a beautiful stained glass window scene, which tells the backstory of a monarch who is tricked into allowing his kingdom to fall into ruin by an advisor who promises him the secret to immortality. Both the quality of the visuals and voice acting are top-notch, and show a promising leap in production values from the former instalment.
Once in the game proper, you’re greeted by bright, cheerful graphics that would later become a signature of the series’ playful style. The assets have a Saturday morning cartoon thiccness about them and a colour palette that makes the environments leap off the screen. While not a complete departure from what came before, it feels like Total Mayhem Games made the conscious decision to make ‘fun’ the emphasis of We Were Here, moving away from the slightly more macabre vibe they were leaning into previously. Honestly, I couldn’t approve of the stylistic change more. The visuals don’t need to be bleak and moody to achieve a sense of drama (there’s plenty of that injected into the experience through the gameplay), and the new style is much more characterful and memorable than the alternative. Now, visually, it’s not perfect. Up close, some of the textures are on the blurry side, and I experienced some minor framerate drops in the largest open areas. While that certainly didn’t impact my enjoyment of the game, there will be some who feel the need to gripe about it.
Another area that is vastly improved is the puzzle design, which sees a significant bump in both complexity and style. While the opening duo of games had their moments, the puzzles feel much more varied this time around. We Were Here Together mixes together traversal elements, logic puzzles, and communication conundrums to keep you on your toes in a much more enjoyable way than the previous entries were able to manage. It’s tricky to describe, but the problems now feel much more ‘multiple’ too, with players needing to juggle several different things at once – on top of keeping your partner informed of what’s going on.
Almost in keeping with the new visual style, the puzzles have a more playful feel in this instalment too. Where the first two games had a very ‘occult’ feel to them, We Were Here Together shifts towards general ‘fantasy’ or even ‘steampunk’. You spend less time trying to decipher arcane symbols and more time navigating environments jam-packed with ancient engineering that needs to be understood and overcome. The change is subtle but noticeable, helping knock the serious edge off the tone, introducing a little more levity, and pumping the game full of character that it was previously lacking. There were a couple of occasions where I felt the puzzles might have been a little too asymmetric, with one player doing all the heavy lifting and the other milling around, but Gaz didn’t agree with me, so experience may vary on that front.
As much as the puzzle design has ramped up, perhaps the trickiest thing to unpick is the game’s menus and UI, which is a bit of a mess. The main menu screen, for example, is not the most accessible, even for someone without any additional needs. You have some items laid out with text-based buttons, while others are hidden behind small icons tucked away in the opposite corner of the screen. Even selecting what you want isn’t as simple as it should be. Scrolling between items is confused by their physical layout not matching the inputs you need to press to reach them, as well as being incredibly difficult to see what you have selected, as the glow effect used to highlight your choice is nowhere near obvious enough.
The worst two offences are not menu design choices, but in-game ones.
The first issue: at one point, you’re asked to choose between two options – on screen, they’re shown at either end of a horizontal line, encouraging you to press ‘left’ or ‘right’ on the controller, right? Wrong, bozo. It turns out you need to push ‘up’ or ‘down’ on the stick, representing forward or back, in relation to how things are laid out in the environment. This might sound like a very finicky thing to complain about, but this confusing design choice led to me needlessly failing a time-sensitive action, and I actually had to replay the section a further two times before understanding what the game expected of me. The default audio mixing and odd-ball button layout round out the examples of head-scratching design choices that somehow made it through an army of playtesters, but at least these can be adjusted.
The second is that the game doesn’t lock out your partner’s walkie-talkie while you’re in a cutscene, but it does lock out your own. This means that I was trying to pay attention to the NPC dialogue when Gaz came barrelling over the top, blabbering about what he’d just experienced, repeatedly asking me if I could hear him – all the while I couldn’t hear a thing about what was going on and was powerless to tell him to shut his pie hole. I ended up missing a few bits of exposition as a result, though I was at least glad that none of the puzzles relied on any lore shared in the cutscenes.
Speaking of in-game lore, We Were Here Together lays the first real tracks into a longer, overarching tale that would continue in Forever through recurring characters like the Jester and King Bartholomeus. The story elements (while incredibly welcome) are still taking root here – it’s all a little thin and surface level, without any real meat on the bone. I guess you could say that, at this point, it’s still the puzzles that are driving the adventure, rather than the other way around.
We Were Here Together may be the inaugural entry on the Switch, but that doesn’t mean you’re stuck playing the game exclusively with your Nintendo buddies, as the game is fully cross-play with all other platforms. We tested the cross-play functionality between a Switch and Steam copy and found everything incredibly easy to manage – by quickly sharing a pre-made username with your buddy, you’ll be donning your parka and radio in no time. We also (for the first time!) had no problem initiating voice chat, either on a headset or with the Switch 2’s integrated mic.
We Were Here Together might be the third instalment in the series, but it’s the first of the lot to really flex its muscles. Armed with a bold new look, a clearer sense of style, and some great puzzle design, Together accentuates all the positives from the previous instalments whilst growing a whole new sense of character. There are some UI gripes and small graphical hiccups on the Switch, but as a game that leans much more on brains than on brawn, We Were Here Together fits perfectly in the Nintendo-sphere. While it lacks the final spit and polish of the later episodes, it’s fantastic to see the series opened up to a whole new raft of explorers on the Switch.
Recommendation Score
In the interest of full disclosure, VGamingNews was provided with a copy of the game in order to conduct this review.
Interested in other games in the We Were Here series? You can read about them all here:
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