Last weekend, I went to and (after 50 of the allotted 60 minutes) managed to escape a room. Escape rooms are great; self-contained little environments which a group of friends, family, coworkers or (I guess) enemies have to scour for clues, communicate what’s been found, and collaborate on putting together the solutions to cryptic puzzles. They’re a lot of fun, and it’s with good reason that they’ve turned into a bustling cottage industry.
However, a day before visiting said escape room, I got to warm my brain up with a video gaming cousin at WASD. We Were Here Forever is the fourth game in the We Were Here series – the first game released for PC in 2017, followed quickly by two sequels in the two subsequent years, and then ports to console. Each entry revolves around the same hook, of having the two players separated, but having to work together in order to gather clues and solve the puzzles that they face.
The time-limited demo for We Were Here Forever dropped myself and Nic into a bizarre abstract environment. Stood in a pentagonal room with a portal-like door on each wall and a massive crank in the middle, there wasn’t really all that much to go on, and popping through one of the doors would drop you back in the same room.
It was only when looking up that we realised that we could see one another, trapped in similar rooms. The trick was that when viewed from afar, we could see some symbols on shields above the doors, kept out of view of whichever one of us was in the room. Pushing or pulling the central crank would rotate the room around the player
The trouble was communicating with one another. I think it’s safe to say that many of us have got used to party chats where everything you say is broadcast to all the members of the call, and some noise-gating so that only your voice is transmitted. That’s great for a fevered Destiny raid where you need to call out enemies and actions while you’re still doing them, but We Were Here leans on the thematic device of a good old fashioned walkie-talkie.
It takes a bit of adjusting to use a walkie-talkie, beyond even modern push-to-talk options in other games and party chat apps. Yes, you’re pushing to talk, but the walkie-talkie has the binary ability to transmit or receive, and there’s a real mental hurdle to adding ‘Over’ to the end of every sentence, just before letting go of the button to talk. That and each of us figuring out what the other meant when saying to push the crank “clockwise”. Invariably we got it a little bit wrong.
Still, we did start to make progress, turning rooms to match symbols and make certain doorways become functional, leading to more and more pentagonal rooms. It wasn’t long before I helped navigate Nic to a room with a giant key to turn, transforming the puzzle we faced by adding… yet more pentagonal rooms! More room turning – “No, no. The other clockwise!” – more symbols to match, and gradually we found ourselves on the inside of a huge sphere made up of these pentagons, just as the final minutes and second ticked down on our time with the game.
This was really an ideal sample of the game for a public showing, giving a bitesized example of a puzzle that requires multiple perspectives, but with both players sharing the same fundamental clues to communicate. I fully expect there will be more asymmetrical puzzles through the full game, just as in previous games, as the secrets of Castle Rock are teased throughout.
Sadly I can’t say that we made it out in time, though the goal was in sight. I’m looking forward to picking up the puzzling adventure when it releases on 10th May for PC – Xbox and PlayStation versions are in the works for a later date.