We Were Here: lost in the ice, with nothing but radio static between you

Two players share a castle but never a room, and the next puzzle only gives way once one of them trusts what the other is describing.

Two people, one castle, and no shared view of it

Lost in the ice, separated from your partner inside an abandoned castle, you are left with exactly one thing: an old radio and a familiar voice at the other end. That is the only link between the two players of We Were Here — neither sees the other's screen, neither walks the same corridors. One is shut into a small, sealed-off corner of the fortress; the other roams everything else, trying to work out from a voice alone what to do next. On one side you can see the answer and have no name for it; on the other you hear the description and cannot see the symbol. Neither of you solves anything alone.

The game asks for a pair and an actual microphone — that is in the system requirements, not a turn of phrase: with no working voice on both ends, there is no game. Independent studio Total Mayhem Games calls it a pilot episode. We Were Here opens a co-op puzzle series set in a fictional castle modelled on Castle Rock, Antarctica, where isolation does the work of tension.

The pilot episode that became the way into something bigger

The studio's news feed has little to say about this first chapter. It talks about the next one. Across the year, the posts from Total Mayhem Games have circled around We Were Here Tomorrow, a new standalone entry in the series, set in a retrofuturistic outpost run by the fictional Norček Industries and built on the same premise: two explorers who can reach each other only by radio. The studio even put out a demo of the follow-up, available for a week, and set its release for October 20.

The same two-player setup as ever, just with new tools and a different backdrop — a sign that the series did not stop at the frozen castle where it all started. Play this first chapter and you are stepping into a story the studio keeps building on, not an abandoned project; reach the end wanting more, and the next chapter has already mapped out where to go.

The botched description is the best part

Pairs who already know each other well end up describing the same scene in completely different ways: one of them gropes for a name for a symbol, the other guesses wrong, and the mistake becomes the funny part of the evening. It is the kind of fumble that, with you at the other end of the radio, would have cost you a good joke too. One player who spent an hour in the frozen fortress says, in a review dated September 14, 2026, that she never quite got her head around how the radio worked and still came away satisfied, relieved to have escaped ahead of her partner. Another, with three hours logged on September 9, 2026, calls the experience gripping and fast-moving and warns that it demands attention — the kind of warning that only lands after you have blown a puzzle by trying to decide too quickly.

A player with two hours behind him boils the whole thing down, in a review dated September 16, 2026, to an image that survives any language: the better a pair learns to read each other over the radio, the more the castle charges them for it — every clean exchange opens onto a puzzle harder than the last. Something similar is what left a couple, three hours of play each, in a review dated September 14, 2026, wanting to move straight on to the next chapter in the series, and that after all their howling about the most baffling stretch of the castle, set in a theatre.

When the audio gives out, so does the partnership

The harshest complaints do not mince words. A review dated July 12, 2026, with two hours played, describes freezes for no visible reason, an audio system that refuses to work, and levels that shut the game down on their own mid-attempt. Catch a crash in the middle of a puzzle and you are the one starting over alone, with no way of knowing whether your partner is still on the line. A Russian-language review with no hours logged reports much the same faults, in the menu as well as in play.

The most consistent criticism, though, is not about a technical fault but about design. A two-hour player describes the split of roles, in a review dated September 28, 2026, as lopsided by construction: whoever explores is always doing something, whoever reads is standing still and reading, and the two sides do not even move at the same pace. As he sees it, about half the puzzles never require a real exchange between the pair — you can crack them on your own, which hollows out the very premise the game is named for.

A Japanese-language review, three hours played on September 14, 2026, lands on a different letdown: there is an achievement called Happy Ending, a name that promises a happy ending the game does not have — just a loose trophy, and the sting of it weighs more than any badly resolved puzzle. Even so, the player who adds up the freezes, the puzzles brute-forced by elimination and a second half harder than the first still closes out with a question: whether the later chapters fix what this one left unfixed.

Without a partner paying attention, the castle stays shut

We Were Here is not measured in scores. It is measured in whoever sits at the other end of the radio. Spend two or three hours beside someone willing to phrase the same sentence three different ways so that it finally clicks and you come away satisfied, and that is the only audience the game really asks for: nothing substitutes for a second person paying attention at the other end of the line. Anyone who needs a game with no technical fault, no crash and no puzzle solved by elimination will hit exactly the same walls the Portuguese-language review and the Japanese-language review already hit. And anyone wondering whether the series gets better from here finds the answer in the chapter the studio itself is already building — not in this first one.