We Were Here Tomorrow Review

There’s a good chance my partner and I got extremely unlucky during our time with We Were Here Tomorrow. It appears we encountered a pretty serious bug that repeatedly stopped the series’ trademark walkie-talkie function from working correctly. For an asymmetrical co-op game that’s all about communication, losing the ability to speak is quite a big problem.

This is Total Mayhem Games’ sixth release in the series across nine years, with 2022’s We Were Here Forever the last full-length feature. Where that took the escape room-styled antics to the creepy Castle Rock, this latest adventure thrusts you underneath the ice of Antarctica and into the mysteriously abandoned Norček facility.

The lab itself feels more like a space station than a snow-bitten research centre. Although the series’ chunky graphics still have a welcoming vibrancy to them, the facility is a labyrinth of powered-down doors, upside-down walkways, and enough pipes to stretch all the way to the Arctic. Take note of those pipes, you will be asked to get electricity moving through them A LOT.

This mechanical foliage makes up many of the puzzles in We Were Here Tomorrow, which veers toward frustratingly obtuse rather than a satisfying challenge that makes you want to play more. Many puzzle rooms are too big, and too open, to methodically work out in an enjoyable way. The game ignores its best bits – the quirky stuff – to throw repetition at you.

One section, for example, splits you apart from your partner and challenges you to direct beams of light through a couple of small passages. This is initially quite fun, with rewarding progress that flows nicely. But then the mechanic is used again in a huge room, across two opposing floors. While the usual array of notes and clues provide some footing, the slow-moving, often trial-and-error nature of such a challenge means the gratification quickly disappears.

Similarly, a later puzzle has you firing up generators to…once again power up some pipes. The initial task takes a few minutes, as lights satisfyingly clink on and doors open in the next room. But guess what? That next room is the same challenge again, made tougher and multiplied long enough that the novelty completely wears off.

Asymmetrical multiplayer games like It Takes Two and Split Fiction are so thrilling because they throw a lot of quick ideas at players without lingering. There’s constant change and something new to enjoy. This is the complete opposite to We Were Here Tomorrow, which is happy to keep duos loitering, and often guessing, on complex puzzles that don’t have a clear solution. I fear you could put us back into the aforementioned beam section after solving it and we’d still not quite know the proper way through without prodding and hoping.

Not having that kind of ‘ooh now I get it’ moment is frustrating, particularly as similar issues have arisen throughout previous games in the series. In general, We Were Here Tomorrow is prone to staying on one idea for too long, a factor reinforced by players holding onto the same piece of equipment (one wields a sticky gun, the other shoots goo to make boxes and ledges) for much of the game.

It’s also a massive shame that much of our review was spent without comms working how they should. There’s an excellent section early in the game that forces one player into getting shrunk – with their voice on the mic going comedically high-pitched alongside it (see: quirky stuff that is needed more often). That seemed to trigger intervals where at least one of us couldn’t hear the other. Upon quitting out and trying again, our walkie talkies would intermittently get stuck on and off screen, and then we couldn’t interact or pick anything up.

We managed to fumble through and eventually get going into a smoother experience, but hours later, the mic system broke again. Maybe it’s a cruel joke, with that repetition of annoyance breaking the fourth wall.

Even ignoring such bugs, there’s a sense that We Were Here Tomorrow could be so much more fun than it actually is. The most joyous moments come from the company you play with, rather than the game setting up too many situations that allow shenanigans to ensue.