We Were Here Tomorrow: two walkie-talkies, an Antarctic lab, and no other help

There is a kind of game almost nobody makes properly, and Total Mayhem Games has been making it for ten years.

Two players. Two different rooms. One walkie-talkie. And puzzles neither of you can solve alone, because each holds half the information.

Out on 20 October. No score today.

What makes this series unique

The central mechanic is not in the game, it is in your mouth.

You see a symbol. Your partner sees a mechanism. Neither of you knows what the other is looking at. And the only way forward is to describe.

That is why these games produce such precise memories. You do not remember solving a puzzle, you remember spending ten minutes explaining a shape you could not name, while the other person lost their mind at the far end of the complex.

Vocabulary becomes the real challenge. Couples who play these games often discover they do not call things by the same names.

This entry's setting

You set out on an expedition to save your fellow Explorers, and you become victims of bad timing: you and your partner end up trapped beneath the ice of Antarctica.

When you wake, the world around you is no longer the one you remember. You are inside a facility belonging to Norček Industries, where the charismatic Director Kathleen Bowe is waiting.

Her team was on the verge of a breakthrough, then it mysteriously disappeared, leaving the work unfinished. With a global crisis looming, the Director turns to the two of you to continue.

And to finish that work, you must take on a series of complex tasks throughout the facility. Often separated, you will rely solely on your walkie-talkies.

The sentence that interests me

The studio writes: only together will you unravel the mysteries surrounding Norček Industries and discover the truth. Only together will you decide.

That repetition is not a writing tic. It is the series' signature, and it probably announces something: in previous entries, the ending posed a moral question forcing both players to decide, sometimes against each other.

I will say no more for anyone who has not played. But if you are new to this series, be aware that the question "can I trust the person on the other end of the walkie" is not always rhetorical.

What I am watching

The difficulty of describing. That is the only variable that counts. Puzzles too easy to describe become ordinary observation games. Puzzles impossible to describe become an hour of frustration. The balance rests on one thing: the symbols have to be strange enough that naming them is hard, but coherent enough that you eventually manage.

Length. Previous entries ran four to six hours, which is the right format for an evening with somebody. A game of this type that drags loses its audience along the way, because it needs two people available simultaneously.

And asymmetric replayability. In these games the two roles do not see the same things, so a single playthrough shows you half the content. The best entries genuinely made you want to replay the other side.

Who it is for

For two people who communicate well. That is all, and it is a lot.

I have recommended this series for years to people who would never have considered it, and the reaction is always the same: they come back with an anecdote, not a puzzle.

That is the sign of a game that understood its content is not what it puts on screen, it is what happens between two people while they look at it.

If you are looking for something to do one evening with somebody at a distance, wishlist this one. On 20 October you will find out very fast whether you describe shapes the same way.

Got a story about an argument over a puzzle? That is this genre's reason for existing, tell it on the InsertCoins Discord.