While my wife and I have consistently played all of the LEGO games that have allowed for co-op together split-screen, this last generation brought another style to the table she was less familiar with. While there have been asymmetric co-op puzzle games over the years (the most notable being Portal 2 in my mind), she hadn’t been exposed to them and they can take getting used to since they introduce new challenges in the fact that you don’t necessarily share a common view of things. 

In the case of We Were Here, that opens the door to a specific style of puzzle play, with both people needing to communicate what they’re seeing in order to figure out what needs to be done. As we’ve seen with some other titles, this can sometimes be very frustrating, simply because if you’re not cheating and looking at each other’s screens you really need to focus on clear and concise communication. In terms of how gameplay comes across I’m sure it really makes for a snore since you’ll simply see people pausing or repeatedly running to the same spots repeatedly. While at the time that’s from people needing to recheck details and communicate, it’s something that doesn’t come across as exciting play, for sure.

The thing is, especially when compared to some of the game’s peers, we had some issues with this one. The first is that while it ran reasonably well on the Switch 2, on the OG Switch the game’s performance was downright jittery with some regularity. This really exacerbated issues when trying to interact with anything in the environment, and given the somewhat simplistic overall aesthetics of the game, there doesn’t seem to be any reason for it to be performing this poorly. The other issue is that the area my wife had to explore was simply too big and full of things that weren’t of use to her, simply wasting time when she was in the wrong room or trying to pick up items that she couldn’t interact with. 

Throw in some peril where time was of the essence in spots, and while she scrambled to simply figure out how to help at all, not even getting to the puzzle itself, I died, and that felt unfair. What then added insult to injury was making us go back multiple puzzles and starting again, particularly pointless since we already would know how to solve the same puzzles anyway, and again just wasting time on nothing of value. Once you take into account the poor performance, and what feel like unforced errors in general design, the overall package loses its appeal, especially since there are already multiple similar titles without these issues in the eShop.