Disclaimer: I received a copy of Where Are My Friends? for the Nintendo Switch from developer Beard Game Studio and publisher Sometimes You through Indie Gamer Chick's #IndieSelect. The game was given and received without promise or expectation of a good review, only that the game be played immediately and that I share my experiences playing the game through social media channels. All of the words contained in this article, unless otherwise noted were written by me and are my own.
Just to warn you all before starting, this is going to be a lot longer article than I had originally anticipated. There was quite a lot to talk about in regards to how the game played, as well as some bugs/glitches that I came across. I briefly thought about turning this into a two-parter, but determined in this case, that a single article would better suffice. So, just keep that in mind as you start in on this.
My thoughts about Where Are My Friends? kind of ran the gamut of feelings about as much as the game jumped genres. So let us start here. I had zero context for what WAMF? was going to be prior to downloading the game. What the game started out as, reminded me a lot of One Eyed Kutkh by Baba Yaga Games. I started the game without any context as to story or tutorial, only with being able to move our one eyed protagonist through a spaceship following visual clues to go where I was told our main character needed to go. My first thought was that the concept was cute, and that it was introducing a simple problem solving by picture mechanic and that a late 30 year old was not the specific demographic for this game. I thought, maybe a game that a five to eight year old could play with their parents. I persisted though, partly because it is part of the rules, but I also did not want to immediately write off the game as I did enjoy One Eyed Kutkh even though I was definitely not the target audience.
The search for your friends then continued after a slightly confusing scene showing a planet exploding. Or possibly exploding. Threat of exploding? Anyway, following that questioning sequence, you go to what is essentially a transporter that takes you to the last known location of your friends. This is when things get weird, and I will take you along in the order that I did this, although I presume that they can be done in any order your want.
This first new area I entered immediately made me throw away my assumption that the game was developed with a six year-old in mind. What I found myself in was a mix of Super Meat Boy and Portal. This portion of the game consisted of single individual screens where you had entered a checkpoint (upward facing light) and had to pass through the white beam of light to the next stage below. All the while navigating through different colored portals and avoiding purple laser beams that would kill you in a single hit. One of the nice things about dying in WAMF? is that death was often instantaneous and so was respawning. Following the sound of shattering glass, you came back at the checkpoint. My biggest complaint with this Super Meat Portal Boy section was that it went on for about twice as long as I felt that it needed to. Granted the entire stage did a good job of introducing new elements at a steady pace, but after a while, the difficulty just increased and it started feeling like a slog. I have no idea how many screens were in this area, but it really felt like there were 10 too many.
Following that high stress series of levels, I was wonderfully greeted (after selecting the next friend I wanted to look for) by the most unexpected level design, and really set my mind for what Beard Game Studio was trying to accomplish with their game. This new section was all about point-and-click adventure games. Similar to the opening area in the spaceship, this level actually gave you your own inventory list and cursor that you could move around. Maybe because I was coming off of games like Thimbleweed Park, and Earthworms, I was very excited to see this type of mechanic, especially after coming off of a stage where dexterity was a required attribute. None of the puzzles were too complicated although I did "solve" more than one my trying out items anywhere I thought they would fit.
The third area, again saw a drastic change in genre. Here was a more traditional side scrolling platformer, similar to the Super Meat Portal Boy, but less based around the portal/laser mechanic and instead involved platforms and spikes. The level design was also based around limited visibility and turning on generators which (thankfully) doubled as checkpoints, because I died a lot in this area. This area was also the first time I came across a glitch in the game that prevented me from progressing any further. This stage is made up of one of seven(?) tunnels each with a slightly different approach to platforming. In the orange stage, there are supposed to be moving platforms and spikes, but my first run in the orange tunnel had nothing moving. This glitch was fixed after turning the game off completely then starting it up again. This was also the second time that I felt that this area went on longer than it should have. Had there been only four tunnels instead of seven(?), I felt that it could have had the same effect and level of accomplishment.
The last area was made up of two different styles of game play, although both felt very similar to BIT.TRIP.RUNNER. This last stage (last for me, but it all depends on when you select to play this one) also saw a pretty drastic artistic style, but one that makes sense story-wise. Gameplay was simple in that you activated the character to start moving forward and then, just like Commander Video, you jump up stairs, over obstacles, and past checkpoints. These stages are not overly complicated and do not get anywhere near the complexity of even later stages in the original BIT.TRIP.RUNNER, but you understand what it is that they are going for.
Then, as a Part B to this stage, the developers switch things up a bit and play a similar auto-runner, but now from an overhead view. This took a lot more time to get used to as it often felt like the hit boxes for the moving Frogger-like platforms was a lot smaller than the actual object that I was trying to land on. The jumping mechanic in the game also gave me a lot of issues in these portions of this stage. In the game, once you gain the ability to jump (and the stages where you do actually jump), if you hold down the jump button (which changes depending on the stage that you are in), you will make continuous, slightly shorter jumps. This becomes an issue when you are trying to make semi-quick timed jumps from one moving platform to another. One of the other issues I had with this stage, was that there were times that the moving platforms just did not line up and I essentially was forced to die and respawned back at the check point.
And if you thought that that was the end of it, nope! Like the Super Meat Portal Boy and Limited Light Platformer (stages 1 and 3 respectively), this one went on way too long as well. Following the side scrolling and overhead views, it then went to another side scrolling with slightly different lane shifting mechanics reminiscent of RUNNER2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien, followed by this mind-fuckery. On a couple of fronts mind you.
You may not think that having your character come from the top of the screen instead of the bottom, but it took my brain a long time to get the controls correct. Here, when you move the joystick left, your character moves left. When you move the joystick right, your character moves right. Now, my brain, for what it is worth, felt that because the character is moving top to bottom, that the controls would be flipped. That moving right on the joystick would have the character go to their right, being the players left. I realize that does not make a lot of sense, but it was definitely challenging. Then throw on top of that that the game was glitching and allowing me to essentially ride over the water, but still be affected by enemy projectiles and obstacles was another. Even after turning the game completely off and then on again, I still ran into the same issue of being able to ride over the water, but only up until a certain point and then I sank/died. What eventually I was able to do was play the level as if I were jumping off of the moving platforms and for whatever reason, this allowed me to progress to the next area of this stage, which again, was a side scrolling BIT.TRIP.RUNNER stage, but, this final stage did some trippy stuff that I loved and was a great way to end the game on.
Because this was the fourth of four friends stages and I discovered all my friends. The last part of the game ended with a choice for the main character that I was not prepared for. Beard Game Studio, did something with their story telling throughout the entire game, that makes sense in the end, but really, with all of the visual aesthetics and music, do quite a bit to downplay the end of the game. it is a great end to the game, but continuing to be purposefully vague, definitely elicited a, "Wow. . .ummm. . . .hmmmm. . ." in the best possible way.*
I would say that I would recommend Where Are My Friends?, as a whole, although three of the four levels I felt could have been trimmed down a bit (Super Meat Portal Boy, Limited Light Platformer, and BIT.TYPE-TRIP could all have been much shorter and still had the same accomplished effect. The bugs/glitches that I experienced too were a bit frustrating, not initially knowing if I was somehow playing the game wrong or if the game was in fact temporarily broken. Even that riding over the water bit garnered a "Wtf???(((" from Beard Studio Games. All hiccups aside, I did, for the most part, enjoy Where Are My Friends?
~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
*P.S. If you wanted to know how I ended the game, you can read below, which does contain spoilers, so just be warned.
Even after discovering that all of your friends died/were killed in the process of setting up the force field to protect the sun from exploding and destroying the planet, I briefly wondered what to do. Remove the force field, letting the sun explode and destroy the planet where the people that killed some of your friends seemed like an outcome I was not ready to experience. I could see the sad reasoning behind that choice, but I then thought of how the characters friends would react to that outcome. That all of their hard work to encompass an entire sun with a protective shield be omitted because of their death seemed too dark for how I wanted the game to end. Sure, as I went through the various levels, discovering the fate of each of your friends, I was taken a bit aback by how not happy-go-lucky the game ended up being. And this, the final image from the game before it faded out to credits, was oddly powerful. I do wonder if the final image had I let the sun explode and destroy the planet, if the eye would look any different, angrier somehow. But I do not know if I am ready to go through all of those too-long levels all over again to find that out.
