izigame.me

Out of all the We Were Here games, this one is definetly the worst. At a glance, it looks familiar, and some puzzles are quite interesting. I have played through the game multiple times as both Peasant and Lord.
My biggest gripes with this game is the lack of polish and puzzle design. A smaller issue is the plot, although this aspect is not the game's primary focus.
Starting with the short and simple, the lack of polish is in its graphical glitches - seeing through walls, floors etc. This can be difficult for a developer to address, so I understand its existence. However, there are other elements that are simple changes. These are the font choice for the books you can read, or the lack of a smooth transition when interacting with the chessboard, or some of the voice lines feeling as if they were first-takes. Most notably, is the music cutting whenever it is supposed to loop again - how did this get through production!? There are plenty of these small details that one can notice at a first playthrough that would not be hard to fix. Whilst these are nitpicks, it affects immersion, as well as the feeling that the developers lacked the passion to finetune their game.
The main problem is the puzzle design itself. Don't get me wrong, there are a few puzzles I like in this game, especially the first three. After that however, then it starts to fall down. This is very much the case for the Lord player for puzzle #4 to #7, as they are barely interacting with anything and will be required to do a lot of waiting. It means providing information, and then generally just waiting for the other player to find or figure out the solution. It gets boring quick. The prime example of this is the puzzle #6, the chessboard, where only one player will actually engage with the challenge at hand.
There are also stress elements added to some of these puzzles without adding any real tension. Puzzle #3, the staircase with the cubes, deploy time as a factor really well, as you are constantly provided with new information to digest and translate to the other player. Puzzle #4 that comes right after has a timer that just needs to be constantly checked, slowing down the game without adding any fun.
Finally, the worst puzzle in the game, must be puzzle #7 - the maze. The idea itself is kind of interesting, however the incredibly tight time-limit doesn't add to the experience. I had numerous cases where we successfully took the correct path but was late by a few milliseconds. This was incredibly frustrating, and goes against the spirit of a puzzle game.
I think the saddest thing for the game, is its true ending, where you have to find levers hidden around the game in order to access it. Not only is there a tedious bug at the very end, where if you restart from the checkpoint you are softlocked from one of the levers - but the cutscene itself was just... dissapointing? One of the characters stays behind, because of the vague plot that exists, rendering it a similar end as the other ones. This was elevated even more because we were required to replay the game several times, and re-experience the puzzles we didn't enjoy. Reasons for replaying was because we missed a lever once, the game glitched out, the maze puzzle made us ragequit, and we also had a crash happen.
Speaking of plot, it tries to do environmental storytelling, with a few books hidden around to read, although none of it really captivated me. I think a plot revolved around reading in a cooperative game like this doesn't really work, because the other player either has to listen to you read or wait for you to finish reading. It's yanky lore in the end, which is sad as the setting is really cool!
Overall, it feels like the game wasn't playtested properly, and could benefit from revisions in their later puzzles.