Friendships can often be testing at times, but Where Are My Friends? keeps things simple as your alien besties go missing and it’s your job to find them in this colourful hand drawn world.

Coming from Beard Games Studios, very little is known in regards to the back story, but you wake up on a spaceship as the game’s main protagonist, Wheye, a small wheeled red robot with one eye to find your friends are missing. So begins the hunt for your friends.

Character selection screen
Power required first.

What makes for an interesting playthrough is the game’s combination of 4 genres: dynamic runner, puzzle-platformer, point-and-click and a huge Metroidvania. For the most part it keeps the game feeling refreshing, but this comes with its flaws. Each level also has its own soundtrack and type of gameplay, which keeps the game full of nice surprises and nothing feels too much of the same.

As previously mentioned the game is largely hand drawn for its environments, with some sections looking more sketched in places than others. It disrupts the flow and direction that the devs were taking with the game completely.

Additionally, it’s gameplay mechanics don’t aid the game much more. More often than not your character will jump without you even pressing anything, which particularly makes levels harder when you need to time your jumps to avoid a plant spitting spikes at your one eyeball! I also remember crossing a river jumping floating platforms from a birds eye view which was extremely infuriating as the section just didn’t respond to jumps I made.

Where Are My Friends? Level design.
The levels are hand drawn and look extremely unique to anything I’ve played.

I think this largely comes down to the hand drawn levels, as they don’t seem to be always accurate and also a mix of bad programming in places. Don’t get me wrong I found the game interesting, but these teething problems prevent me from truly enjoying what the game has to offer.

In terms of length, putting it’s difficulty aside, the game is fairly short and I think there were only 4 friends to rescue spread across about 1-2 hour long levels. So Where Are My Friends? Will offer a challenge for those budding platformer lovers among us.

CX Score
  • 55%
    Overall - 55%
55%

Summary

Pros

  • Unique hand drawn levels
  • Ambitious blend of 4 genres
  • Cons

  • Frustrating teething problems with gameplay
  • Random jumping from character
  • Relatively short and nothing to come back to
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