I played Bokura as a date night game with my partner. My partner has a tendency towards what he calls “twee” games. These are cute games with cute graphics and sweet little stories. When we first loaded up Bokura, I groaned internally, because it looked suspiciously like another of his pastel fables.

Then I popped his head off and threw it off a cliff. I felt much better after that.

It's still kind of adorable, though.

Bokura is a co-op puzzle-platformer that is (thankfully) light on the platforming. You play as one of two children lost in the increasingly spooky and unnerving forest. The children must navigate a series of puzzles, each chipping further and further at both their humanity and sense of reality. However, even as the world shifts and contorts around them, they maintain their sense of childlike wonder and innocence, giving the game a persistently sweet and earnest feeling, even as my partner uses my corpse to float across a river to the decapitator.

I love that you thought I was joking.

This blending of horror and a bizarre sense of nostalgia is a large factor in what makes this game such a trip to play. Though I am not Japanese and don’t have a particular nostalgia for getting lost in the mountains on my way to blow up a statue of my father, the sense of adventure and mystery, and of every tree or rock being something other than the obvious is a familiar one. More than anything, playing through Bokura reminded me of my sister, and of all the times our games together brought us to places we probably shouldn’t have wandered into.

My sister and I grew up in a small museum town in rural Pennsylvania. We were the only children for miles, and so, inevitably, we became each other’s closest companion and playmate. We rode our bicycles up and down the village’s single street. We explored the forest and followed bear tracks. We climbed the rotting coal breaker, and stared down at the cars that people had pushed into the abandoned mine shafts in the vast expanse of coal strippings. Everything became an adventure, and though we came home with cuts, bruises, and splinters on multiple occasions, we invariably kept each other safe.

It’s this that Bokura evokes for me. I may have played this game with my partner, but it was my sister who I saw on the other side of the screen.

I was not kidding. Just so you know.

Bokura’s gameplay also feeds beautifully into this sense of a childlike adventure. Bokura is aggressively co-op, with each player having a different view of the scene surrounding them, and a different idea of the reality of the puzzle they must solve. Either player individually has no chance of solving the puzzle, because the puzzles require the players to communicate and support one another. It’s an approach that can make the game frustrating at times, but also creates a sense of shared adventure. There is no quarterbacking or piggybacking. There is instead the gentle description of what each child imagines they see, and how it interacts with the other child’s world. It’s satisfying and sweet, even as the children bathe in the blood of their slain enemies.

Look, I didn’t say I was the one imagining it. Just that it triggered nostalgia for me.

i did not bathe in blood as a child

Some children just want to watch the world burn

This is not to say Bokura is without frustration. There was a session where I rage quit because the game did not respond to my keyboard inputs and insisted I use a controller. Another time, after carefully navigating a long session, my partner dropped me, and we had to start over. There is frustration, as there always is. However, it often feels like the frustration I felt with my sister when she played pretend wrong - a fleeting frustration that would be smoothed over with explanation and jumping right back in.

Bokura is a deeply weird game, but also a deeply sweet one. It’s a game about characters nostalgic for their childhood, and it succeeds in evoking the same nostalgia in me.

Developer: Tokoronyori
Genre: Puzzle platformer
Year: 2023
Country: Japan
Language: English
Time to complete: 5 hours
Playthrough: https://youtu.be/LzL6hlEU76g