Where Are My Friends? (Switch)

Where Are My Friends? is a game that gives off an unusual first impression. The art style mostly uses bright solid colors and you begin the game in an area that seems to be a good fit for a children’s computer game focused on toying around with your environment rather than any guided play. However, once you do progress into the game a bit, Where Are My Friends? reveals it is an unusual genre mix that happens to feature some rather difficult challenges to overcome. It’s a game that doesn’t really stick to one idea for too long, but this unfortunately comes with the expected problems of unfocused game design.

When the game begins, you find yourself playing as an eye riding atop a mechanical unicycle whose name is Wheye, although the game never tells you this as the game never uses any words to tell its story. Wheye awakens on a vessel in space, its immediate concerns being the upkeep of the space station before it notices that its alien friends are nowhere to be found. Once its tasks are complete, Wheye is able to set out in a search for their four missing companions, the player able to select the order which they’ll tackle the four levels and learn the fates of each of the missing characters. The space station opening segment is, as mentioned, deceptively simple. Rather simple puzzles and minor movement challenges exist in it, but it definitely lead to my initial impression that the game would be a mellow game fit for young kids with its relaxed pace, lack of text, and inviting colors. There’s not much to this section play-wise or plot-wise, it being a mildly interactive hub before you kick things off by plunging into one of the game’s four levels with their distinct genre designs.

While there is no required order to these four stages, they do all warrant some explanation due to how different the are from each other and how they manage to come up short as examples of play in their particular style. The least offensive though must be the point and click section that is set up like an adventure game. Despite being a single eye on a unicycle, this section involves you picking up and interacting with many different objects in a tall building, solving puzzles with whatever you find. Without any words to help and with most of the scenes in this area devoted to explaining what happened to that area’s particular friend, you’re left to figure out how to do things based on visual clues alone, but since you’ll be picking up small objects with no clear purpose, a few of the puzzles will take just trying everything in your inventory to solve rather than clever thinking. Still, this tower features some interesting uses of weather and the position of the rooms as part of the problem-solving, so while it’s not an exemplary point and click segment, it is perhaps the best done of the four levels, offering up what is interesting and enjoyable about the genre it’s using but not doing so with much flair or polish. It feels the most like an evolution of the opening space station segment and could be a decent start to an adventure game, but instead its a so-so experience that condenses its play into a decent size but doesn’t have anything too inspired to offer.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is the game’s worst adaptation of a genre, the cave segment of the game an open-ended side-scrolling platformer. A large dark tunnel branches off into many different areas that must all be cleared, you only really getting to pick the order you tackle them rather than this exploration having much meaning, but this segment falls into a few traps typical of annoying platformers. The most present issue is definitely the limited light in the caves, the player having only a small radius of light around them they can increase occasionally but the tunnels all have plenty of instant death hazards, making this feel more like a precision platformer segment even though you can hardly see all the information you’d need for such a genre to work. Controls for Wheye are usually stiff and struggle with platform edges across all modes, so an area that requires proper jumps in the dark is already doomed to frustration, but then there are off-screen hazards being shot at you at times and long waits for slow-moving vertical platforms that can make it hard to get back into the action after one of many expected deaths. Spikes lurk almost everywhere in this subsection of the game, and with so many necessary paths to follow here, this section can get tedious fast, making the caves the clear low point of Where Are My Friends?

Somewhat of a step up is the runner portion of the game. In one level, Wheye is constantly moving forward on its own, the player asked to control its jump in sidescrolling segments or its movement and jumping in top-down segments. These pack just as many instant death hazards as the caves, both modes packing checkpoints to help deal with these but this leading to one of the issues with the difficulty in this title. Deliberately hard games usually are about training up your skill with the controls and getting an understanding of the mechanics to overcome obstacles, a few deaths expected in a level as you learn it but the player overcoming them once they know what they’re up against. In these running segments though, victory seems to come more from persistence, the player moving forward with little means of skillful interaction and most often dying to something new, the restart just involving them remembering to avoid that hazard or deadly path next time around. When the screen is sidescrolling, jumping is actually pretty reliable and makes for the better portion of this style of play, but top-down has plenty of issues that can’t be ignored. Many leaps of faith exist in this mode, with jumping in general here awkward due to the perspective. The worst though has to be the glitches, where visuals like a sand texture can disappear or even appear where it doesn’t belong, making it hard to tell which areas are solid or are actually bottomless pits. Jumping is already hard to gauge when viewed from above, but factoring in jumps you have to take before you’re sure of what’s ahead and Schrodinger’s ground texture that requires risking your life to test the validity of, what potential there was for this mode of play is again ruined by poor design choices.

The last mode of play on offer is a more traditional platforming experience, Wheye moving through small rooms that combine lasers and portals into bite-sized challenges. Entering one portal will make you pop out another of the same color, and hitting a laser brings you back to the start of that particular section most of the time save for the longer ones with checkpoints. This, more than the cave section, seems to be designed intentionally as a precision platformer, timing required to get through moving portals and dodge the lasers, although the platforming’s problem with edges can make being speedy here more difficult than it should be. Oddest of all though is the fact the small size of these challenges means they can often be overcome without too much trouble or really understanding the challenge before you at times. Entering the room in the right way by chance can lead to you breezing through it unexpectedly, and other times you might find a path to beat the room that didn’t seem to engage with everything going on in it. The design of these rooms isn’t often bad, it’s just often unsatisfying since so many can be quickly overcome without too much effort, and the ones that do put up a fight sometimes achieve it due to sloppy controls rather than the area’s legitimate design challenges. Still, this genre style at least comes second-closest to achieving what it’s going for and could have likely been tightened up some if the developers weren’t designing so many other ways to play that also didn’t turn out too well due to the split attention.

THE VERDICT: Where Are My Friends? is interesting for featuring many different play styles, but unfortunately it doesn’t do any of them well. The point and click section fares best with some decent problem solving, but then the awful and tedious exploration segment featuring an overly dark spike-filled cave makes it hard to appreciate that passably done segment. The runner area meanwhile has little to offer when it does work but its problems are amplified when it switches to a top-down perspective, the entire section being by far the glitchiest portion of the game. The platforming area could have been a saving grace, but unfortunately the challenging rooms tend to end in abrupt and unsatisfying ways, the game in general not willing to spend enough time on any one idea to develop them into solidly executed concepts.

And so, I give Where Are My Friends? for the Nintendo Switch…

A TERRIBLE rating. Split off and given a proper level of attention, any of the four main genres featured here could have had their biggest problems resolved. The point and click segment, the closest thing to a highlight and perhaps the part that saved this game from an even harsher rating, could fit into a larger experience well enough, but here it’s left carrying too much weight for how little there is to its problem solving. When combined with the other three main modes of play, it makes for a poor package that doesn’t really justify this experimental approach to design. Each area is weaker for the fact it can’t get the proper level of focus, whether it be because of glitches that slipped through, poor design choices like darkness in a precision platform focused area, or challenges that can be overcome with repetition rather than developing skill.

Already such a genre mix would have trouble finding itself an interested audience, but even people coming to see the experimental nature of Where Are My Friends? won’t find much on offer. Besides some visual flair, especially during the runner segments where things take on a new style, very few moments of the game seem to be done with the level of quality the designers were likely hoping to achieve. Focus is a necessary part of any project, but Beard Games Studio was overambitious in what appears to be their first development outing. Too much was attempted here, and the brief moments of promise are let down by not having the backing they needed to grow into structurally sound experiences.