Early Access Review: BOKURA – Sorry, I’ve Got No Head

BOKURA really is about the friends you make along the way… or the ones you lose after a heated argument when your buddy keeps pressing the wrong buttons to progress in the level.

Developed by Tokoro-nyori, this side-scrolling co-op puzzle adventure game fully relies on communication between the two players in order to complete it. In fact, friendship matters so much in BOKURA that it can be played with only one purchase; you simply provide your friend with a randomly generated code to allow them to join your game.

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Narrator: Little did the young boy know that they were in a game where things would just work out if they kept playing.

BOKURA begins with a man commuting from work by train. He reminisces about the boy he was best friends with as a child, and we’re then thrown into a flashback of the two boys playing their favourite game together. They are from different backgrounds; one is from a rich family while the other is from a poor background, yet they have found a connection in the game they both love so much. The two decide to run away from home together and propose a plan to climb up the town’s mountain and blow up the statue of the Mayor with fireworks before they leave. During their journey, they come across a dead deer and suddenly pass out. Upon waking up, they’re in a strange alternative universe.

This is where BOKURA gets interesting. My friend and I were reading out our characters’ lines, and when we were approached by a married couple who were searching for their lost son in the forest, I told my friend “I’ll say the sheep character’s lines,” to which my friend replied with, “what sheep?” Our minds were blown when we realised that we were staring at two different settings. My character had been thrown into a forest world where we had been transformed into a duck and bear; my friend’s world was futuristic and we were playing as robots.

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Admittedly, I had been confused when my friend marvelled at how the world looked ‘futuristic’ when we first passed out, but thought nothing of it. 

And it doesn’t end there. We proceeded to the next area where we came across a body of water that needed to be crossed. I stopped at the edge, trying to work out how we would both get over the water without drowning – meanwhile, my friend simply walked across, and seemed confused as to why I had stopped. That’s right, we were facing different obstacles too, and would have to verbally guide each other on how to work through the level together.

BOKURA is simply genius in this aspect and I haven’t played a multiplayer game like it. Not only is it a great way to improve on communication skills as you learn how to describe a situation to your partner to solve the puzzle, but we were filled with childish glee at the prospect of seeing different things – constantly pointing things out and asking each other if they were seeing the same thing too.

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The robot world was certainly more aesthetically boring than the woodland. 

I was surprised that BOKURA was released into Early Access as, aside from the final level (I will get to that later), our experience was pretty flawless and I came very close to giving this game a perfect score. There have been some reports of bugs on Steam, but our personal experience was completely bug-free. 

The gameplay is brilliant: its puzzles are super challenging and have a great build in difficulty as you progress. There are constantly new challenges and abilities thrown your way which will change how you approach each level. At one point, I was able to clone myself, which meant I was controlling two characters at the same time. On another level, my friend was able to remove her head. The only problem was that her screen was focused only on the head, so I would have to guide her body across the level if we needed to throw her head elsewhere.

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Only my friend was able to enter this house to speak to the people inside, so she was reading their dialogue out to me over our call. 

The soundtrack is really catchy and actually differs for each person. I did find that the sound effects can get quite repetitive, especially if it’s in response to an action which you are having to repeat. In fact, my friend ended up muting her game for a lot of our playthrough because the constant alarm noises in her sci-fi world were heavily distracting. 

BOKURA is visually lovely. The design of my animal kingdom was really cute with the adorable character designs and vibrant colours. That being said, my world could be surprisingly dark at times; whereas on my friend’s side, she would use a machine to remove her robotic head, I was seeing it be pulled literally from her spine with a sickening crunching noise as her neck was snapped. Similarly, the story also branches off into darker topics later on in BOKURA. Although this did make the visuals and story more interesting, I do think that otherwise BOKURA would be a great game for children to play too, though obviously these gory visuals make this less favourable. On top of this, there was a clear preference on which player had picked the short straw as my visuals were vibrant and fun, whereas my friend’s was drab, monochrome and boring. 

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“So are you seeing a robotic platform lifting me off the ground right now?” “Unfortunately not…”

The same thing could also be said for the gameplay, especially in the last level. For most of BOKURA, the gameplay is pretty flawless and my friend and I were seriously enjoying the experience. Up until the last level, we had both worked together to solve puzzles. Some levels require more input from one player than the other – but it was always balanced out. This completely fell apart in the last level where my friend removed her head and we were required to leave it on a button while I guided her on moving her body to where it needed to be. This happened for around two hours of our seven-hour playthrough – making the gameplay heavily one-sided as my friend was barely having any control in the challenges at all. 

I believe some of the puzzles needed a few extra autosaves, especially the final level as it required a lot of waiting around and trial and error. On top of this, some of the puzzles were genuinely impossible to solve without reading out literally everything that you were seeing on the screen. One gave us nine symbols in three rows with buttons below them, and we had to press three buttons to open the gate to the next area. To solve this, we had to find a symbol on each row that was different on our screens – but to figure this out we would have had to be going through each symbol to realise that some were different on our screens.

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Though BOKURA could easily appeal to children, I do think the topic of looking back on childhood friendship is something that mainly adults would relate to. 

Overall, BOKURA is a challenging puzzle game and one of the best co-op games I have played. Without its flaws, it would be a close favourite to Portal 2 in terms of multiplayer enjoyment. Despite this, the imbalance in each player’s experience does drag the game’s score down, especially in the last level where one player has far more gameplay to interact with than the other. 

Jess played BOKURA in Early Access on PC with a review code.

 

 

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