Our Life: Beginnings & Always: a father pays to give his son a friend

A visual novel that records every childhood choice and hands you its consequences years later, inside the story itself.

A father pays to give his son a friend

Jamie is eight years old, lives near the beach, and is drifting through summer days that seem never to end when a stranger approaches the boy at dusk. It's Mr. Holden, the new neighbor, and he's willing to pay for Jamie to befriend his own son. The boy is called Cove, a strange name for an even stranger kid — and whether or not Jamie takes the deal, Cove isn't going anywhere: he's right there, alongside him, to stay. It's out of that crooked bargain between an adult and a child that the romance Our Life: Beginnings & Always offers is born — with no other option on the table.

The game leaves almost everything up to you: your character's name, looks, personality, and pronoun can be redrawn at each stage of life, the pronoun included, even midway through the story. The other characters take note of what you prefer and bring it back later — a favorite drink, a reaction to some piece of news; everything becomes memory for the people who share your life. Only one thing sits outside that freedom: the love interest is always Cove. You choose the pace — love at first sight, an eleventh-hour confession, or simply staying within friendship — but you don't choose who with.

The story spans four stages of life — childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, and adulthood in full. It runs to roughly 397,000 words in all. Reaching the end usually asks 16 to 24 hours of you. The writing and the art are both by GB Patch Games, which publishes the game itself, released in June 2022. Sadness, anger, stress, and worry are shown rather than hidden, and to each the game answers with a scene of comfort — what stays with you isn't life's big milestones but what they leave behind in the small routines of everyday life.

They expected little and came away moved

The positive write-ups keep circling the same theme: people who didn't expect to grow so attached. Picture stumbling into a game by chance, off some random store recommendation, with no other title in the genre to compare it to — that's how one person described the experience, at ease far beyond what they'd anticipated. Another, sick in bed with a chest infection in October 2022, isn't the sort who usually reads romance or gets emotional over a game — and came close to tears at least once.

The most repeated praise is for the choices that come back around. One player who has been through the story three times, as of August 2024, points out how trivial options from the early chapters resurface, now meaningful, much further along. Another, in October of the same year, is already planning to buy the add-ons just to replay the story with different choices.

The sharpest reservation, though, doesn't come from those who disliked it: it comes from within the most enthusiastic praise. On launch day itself, in June 2022, a five-star review highlights the breadth of the choices and credits the paid add-ons with doubling the length of the story — yet it logs the most serious complaint on the positive side: the game allows only one love interest, always the same young man. The freedom to redraw almost everything about who you are runs into one fixed point: who you fall for is decided in advance.

The complaint that isn't about the game

Also in June 2022, days after release, the longest review on the negative side takes aim at something else: it calls the game little more than a sequence of clicks, closer to flipping through a sticker album than to a real game, and cites Pong as an example of what, in the writer's view, deserves the name. It's the one critique there that talks about mechanics — the others target the subject matter. If it's hands-on reflexes you're after, that grievance will ring familiar.

The other lowest scores, posted between June 2022 and January 2024, don't argue about the writing or the gameplay: they reject the game because the romance is always between two young men, with no alternative, regardless of how the player has built their own character.

None of this changes the overall picture: in the sentiment recorded on GOG itself, approval outweighs rejection, though the game is far from winning everyone over — and the disagreement that does exist isn't about what the game delivers, it's about who it lets you love.

Slow pace, fixed romance: who stays and who leaves

Anyone who comes to Our Life expecting reflexes, combat, or puzzles walks away frustrated in the first few minutes: here the action is deciding how your character feels about something, not what they do with their hands. If reflexes are what you're after, the comparison the most critical review draws with simple action games is fair — that isn't the format this game offers.

Those who stay are the ones who take on a different kind of contract: accepting that the love interest is already chosen — always Cove — and trading an unpredictable plot for fidelity to your own choices, which the story hands back chapters later. It's no good for anyone who wants to decide who they fall for; it serves nicely for anyone who wants to decide how.