We Were Here Expeditions: The FriendShip
Total Mayhem Games · Puzzle, Indie, Adventure
Overview
Partner up with your friend online and test your friendship by solving puzzles together in an abandoned amusement park. Work together to overcome brain-teasing challenges in this standalone We Were Here experience.
THE GAMEQ VERDICT5,758 reviews analyzed
What players are actually saying
1. Summary
The FriendShip is a short spin-off of the We Were Here series. Two players, separated and talking over walkie-talkies, work through three trials in an abandoned pirate-themed amusement park, and each trial pays out a bronze, silver or gold ticket that decides how grand their shared boat becomes. What players like most is the communication. Each person has to describe what only they can see, the misunderstandings become stories, and many reviews come from couples, siblings and old co-op partners describing a loud, funny evening. The second trial, Maps & Markers, is the one people argue about: some call it their favourite puzzle in the series, others curse its luck element. The optional gold tier gives completionists something to chase.
Length is the main catch. About a third of the longer reviews bring it up, and 10% put it bluntly ("too short", "only three puzzles", "a demo"). Others call it short and sweet and are happy with one evening's play at the price they paid. Players chasing gold run into most of the other frustrations: luck in Maps & Markers, fiddly jumps and collisions in the final trial, connection drops that reset progress, and an ending screen that sometimes scores a perfect run as zero. Series veterans who expected another full We Were Here game are the least satisfied group.
2. What keeps coming up
What players praise
Talking it through with a partnerHigh
The game asks two people to solve things neither can solve alone, and that design gets the warmest response. Communication, teamwork and trust come up by name in hundreds of reviews, and reviewers often say who they played with: partners, best friends, siblings, a dad. One player liked that "both players are important and usually have different pieces of information," so nobody gets carried. In the first trial, players describe odd symbols and puppet poses under a timer, and reviewers happily quote back the names they invented for them. Arguing over left and right in the final trial is a running joke. Reviewers play up the "friendship test" idea for laughs, joking that it nearly ended a relationship and recommending it in the same breath. The game depends on the pairing, though. A few negative reviews blame a partner who would not listen, and some note that a missing or broken microphone makes it unplayable.
Inventive, varied trialsMedium
7% of the longer reviews praise the puzzles directly, calling them creative, fair or some of the best in the series. Players like that each trial tests something different: quick verbal description, a shared board-game puzzle, and a guided obstacle course where one player sees what the other cannot. A few reviewers liked that the game lets both players see each side of a puzzle in one run, so there is no need to replay it with roles reversed. Players who wanted classic escape-room logic are less impressed (see the comparison with the main games below).
Bright setting, art and musicMedium
Visuals, music, atmosphere or sound come up in 7.5% of the longer reviews. The snowy, run-down theme park and its pirate ride get called charming and well detailed, the soundtrack draws compliments, and a few reviewers note the game ran smoothly on modest hardware and on Steam Deck. A small number called the art plain or the graphics only decent.
A low-commitment way into the seriesMedium
Some reviewers treat it as an introduction or taster for the We Were Here games, and some say it made them want to play the rest of the series. One reviewer summed it up as "a great taste of what to expect in the other games if this is your first We Were Here game." Crossplay also gets a few thanks from players pairing up across platforms, though one reviewer reported failing to connect with a PS5 friend.
A cheerful entry that lets you both surviveLow
After the darker main games, a smaller group welcomes the lighter tone, the brighter colours and the absence of a villain. One player called it "A nice change of pace to play a We Were Here game that doesn't want to kill you at every corner." A few still found parts of the park unsettling, especially the moving boat in the last trial.
Where players are split
Short and sweet, or far too shortHigh
Players who aim for bronze tickets report finishing in about an hour; pairs who chase gold on everything report spending a whole evening or more. One side is happy with a game that fits a single session at a low price: "About the length of a movie and significantly cheaper while a lot more memorable." The other side feels short-changed, especially series fans who expected the scale of the main games, and some reviewers compare it to a paid trailer for the other titles. One negative review ended with "IT'S NOT BAD IT'S JUST TOO SHORT." Complaints that it is too short become more common in later reviews, after the free launch period, as a growing share of reviewers had paid for it.
Maps & Markers: favourite puzzle or luck of the drawHigh
12.5% of the longer reviews talk about the second trial (the colour tile and tower board) or about luck and RNG, and they disagree sharply. Some fans call it their favourite puzzle in the franchise and ask for it as a standalone game; "Maps and Markers should be its own game," wrote one. Others got stuck chasing the top score because the pieces they needed did not come up, and one reviewer who still recommends the game wrote: "It's a complete RNG-fest." Relative to their numbers, negative reviews raise it far more often than positive ones: 11% of the longer negative reviews mention luck or RNG by name. Some players also say the rules are hard to grasp at first, and one wrote that "the diagrams did more to confuse than explain." Getting the maximum score depends partly on the draw, a point some of its admirers accept too.
The bronze, silver and gold ticket systemHigh
Tickets, gold runs or perfect scores come up in 14% of the longer reviews. Plenty of players like that each pair can set its own difficulty: "I really like the choice of being able to just breeze through the game to finish it or perfecting everything to gold." Chasing the golden boat is where much of the playtime and the shouting comes from. Critics, mostly series veterans, say the tiers make the trials feel optional and turn replays into grinding. One wrote that the option to settle for bronze "gives a nagging tug in your mind that you don't need to be here." Retrying a trial means replaying it from the start, which feeds the frustrations further down.
How it measures up to the main We Were Here gamesMedium
Series fans often measure it against the main games. 4.4% of the longer reviews call it the best or their favourite entry, often praising its polish and replayable format, and some prefer it to We Were Here Together or Forever. A smaller, mostly negative group calls it "Easily the weakest entry of the series," and a handful argue it plays like a set of minigames, "a point-collecting carnival game simulator in first-person," with less of the puzzle logic and story they came for. Players who wanted a continuation of the main story were also disappointed that it stands apart from it.
The ticket shredderLow
To retry a trial you feed your ticket into a machine next to the one that claims it, and 2% of the longer reviews tell a story about someone shredding a hard-won gold ticket by habit. Some tell it as a comedy highlight ("My partner shredded A GOLDEN TICKET after many failed attempts to get one."), while a few treat it as a design flaw, saying the two machines sit too close together and look too alike.
What frustrates players
Jumps, collisions and timing in the final trialMedium
In the last trial one player crosses paths only the other can fully see, with moving platforms and timed jumps. Some reviewers name it as their favourite, but most of the mechanical complaints are about it: getting caught on fences and lights, clipping through platforms, falling because a moving platform did not keep up, and jumps that only work with a sprint. One negative review said "it's not a puzzle but a Jump'n'Run with a level you don't see." A failure sends you back to the start of the course, so these misses cost real time, and several pairs say they gave up on gold here. A few reviewers also found the trial's screen effect made them nauseous (see below).
Disconnects, lag and the wrong server regionMedium
Connection problems show up in 4% of the longer reviews but in 13% of the longer negative ones, and bugs, crashes or connection trouble of any kind appear in 26% of the longer negatives. Reviewers describe disconnects that reset a trial, timed sections made unreliable by latency, and walkie-talkies cutting out. Region detection is one recurring detail: one pair said "the game insistedly put us on 400ms Asia servers," and others fixed their lag only after forcing a region in the settings. Another reviewer asked why "the networking issues are this difficult for a game that only has two people per session." Two negative reviews describe never getting past a "Creating session" screen.
Starting a trial over from scratchLow
3% of the longer reviews, and 10% of the longer negative ones, complain about resets: no checkpoints inside a trial, a long walk back after each failure, and cutscenes or setup to sit through before another attempt. One player wrote that "theres no checkpoints partway through puzzles so I have to redo steps 1-5 25 times to get to step 6." Pairs going for gold feel this most.
Rules you have to discover by failingLow
Some reviewers say the trials are poorly explained or the hints unhelpful. The second trial draws most of this, but some found the first trial's timer and scoring confusing too. Others enjoyed working the rules out together, so the complaint comes mainly from players who wanted more guidance.
A perfect run scored as "worst mateys"Low
Pairs report earning gold on every trial and watching their golden boat get built, only for the ending screen to award zero in every category and the worst title. Some link it to a brief disconnect during the run; one pair saw a "waiting to reconnect" pop-up for a fraction of a second. "It said worst mateys even though our ship was clad in gold," wrote one. Some laugh it off, but completionists say it spoiled the payoff they had worked for.
Voice chat quirksLow
For many the in-game walkie-talkies are part of the charm, but some reviewers say the voice chat stopped working mid-session, had no device selection, or blocked one person while the other talked ("When you talk, you can't hear your buddy for some reason."). Several simply moved to Discord.
Long or laggy cutscenesLow
A small group says the cutscenes are long, stutter, or cannot be skipped: "I hated that you couldn't skip the cutscenes." That bites harder on repeat runs.
Progress-blocking bugsLow
A handful of negative reviews describe hard stops: a trial that will not restart after a disconnect and reload ("the board was broken, no tiles or pillars appeared, and the light stayed off, making it impossible to continue"), duplicate symbols in the first trial that make a match a coin flip, and a start-up loop that never reaches the menu. Each one ended that pair's run.
Motion sickness in the final trialLow
A few reviewers warn that a visual effect in the last trial caused nausea even with blur turned off, and one opened with "DO NOT PLAY THIS GAME IF YOU SUFFER FROM MOTION SICKNESS."
3. The player conversation
Many of the reviews are one-liners and jokes about yelling at a friend, failing to tell left from right, or a partner shredding the golden ticket. The detailed ones come mainly from two groups. Series veterans weigh it against the main games and split between "best puzzles in the franchise" and "weakest entry". Completionists who chased gold on every trial report the luck in Maps & Markers, the final trial's jumps, the resets and the ending score bug, while pairs happy with bronze or silver mostly describe a quick, funny evening and then mention the length. Players new to the series sometimes say it made them want the others. Some of the negatives from players with almost no playtime are about failing to connect or start a session at all.
Later reviews are less positive. Reviews written during the free launch period, which reviewers say ran until October 13, 2023, are 92.6% positive. A burst of reviews in late November 2023 is almost entirely positive, and a few of those reviewers say they wrote it for the Steam Awards. From December 2023 onward the positive share is 86.1%, and 81.7% across 2026. Over the same stretch the share of reviews on free copies falls and "too short" complaints become more common.
4. What the developers could do
- Take the luck out of the Maps & Markers gold run. Players who failed to reach the top score in the second trial blame RNG when the pieces they need never come up, and that complaint is more common in the negative reviews.
- Fix collisions and platform timing in the final trial and make it tolerant of latency. Clipping, fence snags and platforms that leave a player behind are the main mechanical complaints, and reviewers on higher ping say the timed jumps become a lottery.
- Repair connection handling and region selection. Disconnects show up far more often in negative reviews than in positive ones, players report being routed to distant servers by default, and a reconnect can leave a trial unable to restart.
- Add checkpoints or a quick reset inside each trial. Pairs chasing gold describe replaying long stretches and cutscenes after every slip, and several gave up on a gold run because of it.
- Fix the ending score bug. Players who earned gold on every trial still get zero scores and the worst title, which spoils the reward the ticket system builds toward.
- Add more trials or expeditions. Length comes up in about a third of the longer reviews, and some players ask for more puzzles in this format, a few pointing to other areas of the park shown on the map.
- Explain the rules more clearly and guard the gold ticket. Players ask for clearer guidance on the second trial and fixes for duplicate symbols in the first, and several want a confirmation step or clearer separation before a gold ticket goes into the retry machine.
- Let players skip cutscenes and turn off the final trial's screen effect. Unskippable or laggy cutscenes slow every retry, and the visual effect in the last trial made some players sick.
