We have finally beaten the game, so I can write a review with a clear conscience. Long story short - it's just bad. Painfully long. We are huge fans of all the installments in the franchise, but not this one. It really feels like this game was made by a completely different team. For us, the core of the We Were Here games has always been their cool asynchronous gameplay, which felt like a game of ping-pong. The puzzles weren't too simple and usually took some time to figure out, but they weren't too complicated either. The rooms were relatively small and compact, and moving between them was fairly straightforward. You didn't have to move around TOO much, and you usually didn't need to write anything down to solve overly complex puzzles. Both players were always doing something. But here, everything is completely different. The game starts with one really nice large sequence, but things go downhill very quickly. The game is full of empty spaces and copy-pasted rooms that serve absolutely no purpose. There are plenty of situations where one player does something while the other simply waits. There's a lot of unnecessary movement that artificially prolongs the gameplay. Most of the time, the gameplay isn't asynchronous like it was in previous installments. It's quite synchronous. Basically, you have a puzzle that's more or less the same for both players in terms of gameplay. It could easily have been a puzzle for ONE person without losing any of its core ideas. But neither of you has a complete view of the puzzle or full control over it. It's hard to explain, but imagine trying to solve a Rubik's Cube together with another person. You can only see three out of its six faces, and you can only rotate certain faces. Your partner can see the other three faces and rotate the ones you can't. It's not fun. It's frustrating. Most of the puzzles lack clear instructions, and you really have to guess whether what you're doing is correct. Sometimes, especially towards the end, you might accidentally do something correctly and only understand the logic behind it post factum. There was one puzzle that relied on fairly strict time management, which my wife didn't enjoy at all. The game introduces new tools, but they also feel like they were added just for the sake of it. You know how the portal gun in Portal and the various mechanics in The Talos Principle are essentially at the core of their respective puzzles? Here, at the beginning, the tools simply differentiate the two players. For instance, there are buttons that one player can interact with and others that only the other player can interact with. Towards the end of the game, one tool becomes a bit more useful, but the other MOSTLY retains its original role. It's not about logic like previous games. This game is more "try and see if something happens". Honestly, during the last 20–30% of the game, we just wanted it to end. The only things keeping us from dropping it were our desire to beat the game and the money we'd paid for it. Totally don't recommend.
