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bokura
4.5/5 beautiful, short game with a story I loved, that touched me more deeply than I expected and was fun to play (at least for a person who doesn't game much, like myself). -0.5 only because doesn't have much replay value for me, not that a game needs replay value, but I've seen that there's other endings you can get by playing through more than once and if there's going to be different endings would be cool if gameplay changed as well on subsequent runs.
This was one of those games that came at the perfect timing, that felt a bit like fate. It's a new year now, and maybe this is because I'm a pessimist, or because I'm almost 30—which although I've never historically felt much suspense about, seems to be something momentous to more of the people around me than not, and I can't say they have no influence on me—but I'm one of those people that looks back rather than forward on the turn of each year.
So once the music started, and I saw my character sitting on the train, thinking about that hamster wheel slog of adult life and reminiscing about the childhood friend he's since lost, it felt like this could've been a story about me. Or about any of us who still feel the faint echoes of those empty spaces left behind by the relationships we buried in our youth.
I always find there's a gentle sadness in empty train cars, in the passing of the world outside.
From there, the game springboards into an amazing journey through the memories of a particular incident with this friend. It's a two player co-op game, where each person plays one friend, and together you solve puzzles and traverse the landscape from one cut scene to the next. What's really cool about the gameplay is that each person sees a different version of the same world and there might be different obstacles and pitfalls in one person's version vs the other, so you have to work together and communicate a lot to get both people through to the end of each stage. What I also really loved about this is there were so many times where you needed each other's help to get through an obstacle, and even though each person might've seen the obstacle differently, it was because of rather than despite these differences that they could figure out how to move on.
The gameplay tied in so well to the story without even trying: these two boys from different backgrounds, different worlds really, seeing the world in such different ways that they struggle to understand each other, yet still being the only people who could help each other through this journey together. A shared journey that tied them together irrevocably, yet pushed them apart at the same time. And the whole time while you're playing, you know that at same point in the future, they're no longer friends.
The story was beautiful in that way. It had elements of fantasy, and was surprisingly dark and eventful for such a short story, but at the same time was entirely, deeply human.
And it was beautiful too, when we ended there, back on that train, and saw that both of the friends were alone on their own train, not knowing that they were both still thinking of each other.
This was one of those games that came at the perfect timing, that felt a bit like fate. It's a new year now, and maybe this is because I'm a pessimist, or because I'm almost 30—which although I've never historically felt much suspense about, seems to be something momentous to more of the people around me than not, and I can't say they have no influence on me—but I'm one of those people that looks back rather than forward on the turn of each year.
So once the music started, and I saw my character sitting on the train, thinking about that hamster wheel slog of adult life and reminiscing about the childhood friend he's since lost, it felt like this could've been a story about me. Or about any of us who still feel the faint echoes of those empty spaces left behind by the relationships we buried in our youth.
I always find there's a gentle sadness in empty train cars, in the passing of the world outside.
From there, the game springboards into an amazing journey through the memories of a particular incident with this friend. It's a two player co-op game, where each person plays one friend, and together you solve puzzles and traverse the landscape from one cut scene to the next. What's really cool about the gameplay is that each person sees a different version of the same world and there might be different obstacles and pitfalls in one person's version vs the other, so you have to work together and communicate a lot to get both people through to the end of each stage. What I also really loved about this is there were so many times where you needed each other's help to get through an obstacle, and even though each person might've seen the obstacle differently, it was because of rather than despite these differences that they could figure out how to move on.
The gameplay tied in so well to the story without even trying: these two boys from different backgrounds, different worlds really, seeing the world in such different ways that they struggle to understand each other, yet still being the only people who could help each other through this journey together. A shared journey that tied them together irrevocably, yet pushed them apart at the same time. And the whole time while you're playing, you know that at same point in the future, they're no longer friends.
The story was beautiful in that way. It had elements of fantasy, and was surprisingly dark and eventful for such a short story, but at the same time was entirely, deeply human.
And it was beautiful too, when we ended there, back on that train, and saw that both of the friends were alone on their own train, not knowing that they were both still thinking of each other.