Our Life: Beginnings & Always, a.k.a. the visual novel equivalent of ASMR
Until this month, I had played exactly two visual novels in my life: Dream Daddy and Camp Buddy. And both of them were games I played five years ago or more. They’re just not my usual type of game.
After writing a blog on the latter, I got a number of recommendations for others I could try, including A Date with Death (@brian_), Mask of the Rose, and Our Life: Beginnings & Always (both recommended by @nuttism). The first and the last of these three games both had the distinction of not only being free (albeit with some paid DLC), but also incredibly well-received, with 98% positive Steam reviews.
In idly looking at their respective Steam pages, Our Life was the one that began to immediately draw me, and the reason was pretty simple: with the extraordinarily gentle music and the utterly relaxing vibe of its trailer, it came off as a soothing, affirming sort of game, like a big fluffy pillow, entirely without edges.
I’ve certainly been known to like, and even generally prefer, stories in books, movies, and TV that have lots of edges and lots of darkness, stuff where everybody dies at the end, etc. But that’s simply not what I’m looking for in a romantic visual novel. Forget the drama, forget the darkness: give me warm and sentimental and fluffy and peaceful, please.
And having now played this game through twice—once without any DLC and once with all of it—over the course of about 40 hours, I can definitively say that this game is awesome. It’s easily my favorite of the three visual novels I’ve played, and will certainly be one of my favorite games I play this year.
I’m not generally a big crier when it comes to media (the ending to Six Feet Under being the extremely memorable exception—IYKYK), but I absolutely cried at points during this game, especially during my second play when I was able to get the full experience. I’m getting a bit choked up just typing this. Playing Our Life: Beginnings & Always is the emotional equivalent of getting a warm hug and being told that everything is OK and that you are loved, and letting all your cares fall away while you play it. Real life is seldom this perfectly comforting and affirming, and that’s its magic.
In the sections below, I’ll start getting into the details. This game is not perfect, though its flaws are mainly of interface and presentation, easily outweighed by the strength of its writing.
The only major caveat I have as far as recommending it is that this game definitely seems intended to be played primarily by people who are, or can be, romantically attracted to dudes (whether you’re a straight woman, gay man, or non-binary, asexual, whatever… I’ll get into that below). The simple fact is that there are no female love interests, and while the introduction/tutorial is at pains to point out that your relationship with the game’s main character, Cove Holden, need not go any further than platonic friendship, it is clearly geared toward romance (I mean, hell, one of the DLCs is all about Cove’s and your wedding).
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe a straight guy or a gay gal could still have a great time with Our Life while just being friends with Cove the whole time. I’d be really interested if someone tried it and reported back, especially since the game is free. But I’m… skeptical… that it could have the same sort of impact.
Final housekeeping note. There are eight paid DLC expansions for Our Life that can be neatly split into three categories: four expansions to the main story, two that add additional love interests, and two Patreon-only 18+ sections. I’ll talk more about the DLCs at the end, but the very short version is that the four main story expansions are no-brainer purchases, bordering on indispensable, while the remaining four are more of a mixed bag depending on what you’re looking for.
With all that preamble out of the way, let’s get started with a look at the Our Life’s basic premise and mechanics… including just how amazingly and refreshingly inclusive it is.
Premise and mechanics
The story of Our Life: Beginnings & Always takes place over the course of four summers (referred to as “Steps” 1–4), each one spaced five years apart. When the game opens, you are eight years old, with the other Steps occurring when you are thirteen, eighteen, and twenty-three years old.
Steps 1–3 all follow the same basic structure. They each get an opening section, followed by optional story vignettes called “Moments,” which could be anything from a trip to a farmer’s market, to a sleepover, to a family vacation. The default, free version of the game has five of these Moments per Step, an amount which doubles to ten each with paid DLC. You can choose to play all available Moments, or just a few, or none at all. However many you play, clicking the button in lower right labeled “And then… summer ended” will take you to the Step’s closing section.
To be clear, even though they are technically optional, the Moments are really the meat of the game. While the opening and closing sections of each Step are enormously important, Moments take up more than half of Our Life’s runtime, especially if you buy the DLC. I wouldn’t recommend skipping any of them, as you’d really just be cheating yourself out of experiencing the full narrative. It’s all much more impactful when you experience the story to its fullest.
Step 4 is different in not having any Moments at all; instead it is just a single, slightly longer sequence that acts sort of like an epilogue, possibly culminating in either you or Cove popping the question to the other. A fourth paid DLC, as already mentioned above, adds on the wedding to Step 4.
Stepping back from overall game structure, the first thing you do in the game is create yourself. Since you’re viewing the story from a first-person perspective, you never actually see your avatar outside of this creation screen (and hence doing things like customizing your hairstyle are largely meaningless), but the game nonetheless dynamically accounts for some features of your appearance in its script, like your hair, eye, and skin color, as well as your pronouns. A free DLC also contains a list of names you can pick which the game’s main character, Cove, will speak aloud at key points (sadly, there is very little voice acting in Our Life).
But your character customization doesn’t stop at the opening screen. The game organically prompts you at various points throughout the story to describe things like how tall you’ve become, how much weight and muscle definition you’ve got, how comfortable you are in your own body, and whether you might want to transition to another gender. I’ve never before played a game that did this, and I really appreciate that it does.
In fact, loving acceptance of all people, regardless of their sexual or gender identity, is core to Our Life’s DNA. Your adoptive parents are a pair of lesbians; one character transitions from female to male between Steps 3 and 4; at least two characters are bisexual; you briefly meet a minor character in Step 4 that uses they/them pronouns; and at least one character is largely asexual. No one is ever criticized or rejected for being who they are; all are loved and accepted as a matter of course by everyone. Realistic? Fuck no. Unbelievably comforting and affirming for anyone who doesn’t neatly fit into the straight man or woman boxes? Fuck yes.
Anyway, the game opens in the sleepy California coastal town of Sunset Bird (some of the names in this game are… a little goofy). You discover that a boy exactly you own age, Cove Holden, has just moved into the house across the street with his father. His parents have just gotten divorced, and he is sad, shy, and awkward, with green hair, a pink cast, and wavy eyebrows. While the game does explore your relationships with other friends and family, the beating heart of the game revolves around the budding friendship—and likely romance—between you and Cove.
The game has several systems running under the hood that help add to its dynamism and replayability. For one, you can set your own character’s level of “comfort” and “interest” with Cove at the beginning of each Step. For comfort, you can set it to Nervous, Relaxed, or Direct. For interest, you can set it to Indifferent, Fond, Crush, or Love. You can also set Cove’s “initiative” to either Low, Medium, or High, which controls how much he’ll initiate physical contact with you (e.g., on “high,” Cove might decide to hug or kiss you all on his own, while on “low” he’ll leave it to you to initiate such things).
A large part of the game’s charm is that Cove will mirror your level of interest; he’s as into you as you’re into him, however much or little that might be. While you can say or do things that upset him, this is not a game with anything remotely resembling a fail state; it’s not a guessing game in search of the True Ending versus the nasty breakup. If you are merely fond of him, then he is merely fond of you, and if you love him, he loves you.
Beyond setting your feelings toward Cove, Cove’s own personality and appearance change dynamically throughout the game based on your decisions and how thing play out. There are two sliding scales that change between Steps: Warm vs. Cold (i.e., more affable and easygoing vs. reserved and needy), and Studious vs Sporty. The former seems to have more effect on Cove’s general interactions, while the latter has more effect on his appearance/clothing. However, you can also view Cove’s current personality sliders and appearance between each Step and manually change them if you like.
A final thing worth mentioning in “mechanics” is that the game is generally quite good about making your choices actually matter. While there are throwaway choices that are just there for you to roleplay and make no real difference—like what ingredients you want on a sandwich—other choices reverberate throughout the entire story, with characters constantly referring back to them.
The obvious example concerns the very first interaction of the game’s story: Cove’s father, worried about his son’s happiness in a new town after the divorce, misguidedly offers you twenty bucks to be his son’s friend. You can choose to take the money or not, and you can choose if and when to tell Cove about it. There are actually four separate achievements for telling Cove about his dad’s offer at each of the four Steps of the story, and when you decide to do so can have a big impact.
Some interface critiques
I don’t really have a lot that’s negative to say about this game, and most of it falls under the heading of “interface,” and sometimes “tutorialization.” It’s also mostly fairly nitpicky, minor gripes (all aside from the first one, really). So I figure I may as well just get it all out of the way in this one section.
The narration vs. dialogue problem
My biggest issue with Our Life is something I already mentioned in my initial comment in the Camp Buddy blog after my first, DLC-less playthrough: the game does no do enough to distinguish between narration and speech. Take a look at the below screenshots.
As you can see, literally the only thing that signifies a character talking versus narration is that the character’s name is added to the blue bar above the text. But the blue bar never goes away, or changes colors. It also doesn’t help that in these two shots, Cove’s mouth is open for the narration one, and closed for the one in which he’s actually talking, which is not unusual.
In both of the other visual novel games I’ve played, not only did the equivalent of the above blue bar completely disappear when the game was giving narration, but each character’s name was also color-coded so that they could be quickly distinguished from one another at a glance.
This might sound like a minor thing, but it’s actually a pretty big QoL issue. After all, with almost no voice performances, the game is almost entirely spent reading dialogue and narration, and there were definitely times when I had to take a second to confirm whether what I was reading was narration or dialogue. And it’s worse in scenes with multiple characters talking.
As it happens, since I had to temporarily join the developer’s Patreon to get the two “Bonus Moments,” I got a chance to bring this up with them directly. The dev very kindly, in the warm and affectionate manner of the game, sent me a personalized message inviting me to ask any questions or share any concerns. Besides telling them how much I’d enjoyed my initial play of the game, I asked about this narration vs. dialogue problem. Here’s what they said.
I’m sorry the narration vs. speech was confusing. … Having the blue bar go away would’ve been nice, but honestly it was a very different time when the base structure of OL1 was in development. The UI is all super simple and static because that’s what we could afford to have made and programmed. I was determined to create OL but the budget was tight and the team was tiny. I went into it thinking it’d be the last visual novel I’d be able to make because I hadn’t earned a sustainable amount of money back from game making after multiple years of trying. Most of our resources had to go into the art because a game like that needed a lot of different locations/character sprites. I never expected OL to become a hit of this level with people holding it in high regard, haha. It really changed everything for my life and the company. Our current and future games are able to focus on QoL a lot more now! … [U]nfortunately we’re not able to patch it out at this point.
On the one hand, I understand being on a shoestring budget (Hello! I’m on one myself in my own job!), and, not being a programmer, I have no real notion of the possible challenges behind making that blue bar go away for narration and changing its color per character. Nonetheless, I still can’t help but think that this shouldn’t have been a prohibitively difficult feature to implement with a little planning and foresight, given its importance. Regardless, it’s a problem, and it’s a pity. It’s not a ruinous deficiency, but it’s both annoying and omnipresent.
Slightly clumsy tutorialization
There is a game tutorial on the top menu that I read through prior to starting my first play. Alternatively, skipping it and trying to jump straight in to playing provides a somewhat shorter explanation of the game’s systems. Neither one has an index to quickly access specific info, or any apparent way to move backward to re-read a bit that you’d already scrolled past without simply going through the entire tutorial again (though there actually is a way… I’ll get to that). It’s also a bit verbose, with a total of *twenty-eight* mostly-identical-looking screens of text (big irony in me criticizing someone else’s verbosity—kettle, black, etc.—but hey, do as I say, not as I do!). It’s a very long string of nothing but text that probably would have been better done within the game itself.
Overly unobtrusive access to DLC Moments
The Derek and Baxer DLCs add four to five bonus Moments in Steps 2 and 3, respectively (more on these later), and are accessed in the Moments menu with a fairly unobtrusive arrow. In my case, after buying the DLCs, I played through all of Cove’s ten Step 2 moments before I realized the arrow was even there. It would have been nice if it could all appear on one screen, or, failing that, if the game could have made the availability of the DLC Moments more obvious at the beginning of the Step.
The game never actually tells you about all the useful controls
I was midway through my second play when I discovered that you can actually rewind time by simply scrolling the mousewheel up. Want to go back and make a different choice without needing to create a bunch of discrete saves? Just scroll up a few times and do it. This also works for the tutorial screen. It’s a really neat feature/control that I wish I had known about a lot earlier… perhaps in the tutorial! No such luck. You can also hide the interface with "H", another thing I didn't discover until after I'd finished playing.
A lack of voice acting that makes auto text useless
This really isn’t a fair criticism or complaint, but simply more of a wish. The dev could not possibly have gotten actors to fully voice this game on the budget they were on, as the script is clearly gigantic, so I can’t blame them for that. Nonetheless, it’s always more enjoyable experiencing a game's story when you can just sit back and let it automatically advance in time with voice performances, without having to constantly click a mouse or press a key. While Our Life does have the option for auto-advancing text and allows you to customize the speed, I’ve always considered this option to be fundamentally unworkable without voice performances to anchor it, since it will almost by definition always end up being a little too slow or too fast for the player's own silent reading speed.
Thoughts on my experience with Our Life
Some slight Step 1 ambivalence
I already mentioned in my previously cited first comment on this game in the Camp Buddy blog thread that on my first play, I actually ended up skipping all but one of the five Moments available to me in Step 1. At that point, I was still in the mode of scoping the game out and wasn’t sure if I was going to play the whole thing right away, and wanted to see what the later Steps were like. In hindsight, having now played all ten of Step 1’s Moments, that was certainly a mistake, as each Moment adds further depth and complexity to the characters and story in a way that can’t help but make you feel it all more deeply, especially considering how good the game is about referencing your past experiences. If you don’t play everything you can, important story beats can’t be referenced later, nor could you understand them if they were, and so the whole thing feels less real.
That said, I can’t deny that Step 1 was the least affecting portion of the game for me, and that’s mainly for a pretty simple reason: I am a grown-ass forty-something millennial, and it’s just a bit harder to emotionally connect with an eight-year-old mentality. That problem is probably unavoidable. Even when I went through the game my second time with all the DLC content and had become more emotionally attached to the characters generally speaking, it was hard to get into such a young headspace without reflexively thinking that a lot of these conversations and interactions were a little silly. Cute, but also eye-rolly.
It didn’t help that your fellow adopted sibling, Liz—your older sister by two years—is at her most insufferable in Step 1 as a bossy ten-year-old, ordering your little cadre of childhood friends around. I can’t deny the authenticity of Liz’s character, as it’s in the nature of some older siblings to be bossy and annoying at some stages of their life, and in the end she really isn’t as bad as she could have been, but nonetheless, the devs clearly intended Liz to be annoying in Step 1, and they… succeeded.
The key to—and the brilliance of—Cove’s character
Before continuing, I must point out that this section in particular is kinda spoiler-y. The relationship between you and Cove Holden is the center of the whole story, and I can’t talk about him without spoiling some of the broad characteristics that make Cove, Cove. If you’re someone who’s sensitive to spoilers, and you have any hint of a glimmer that you might want to play this game for yourself, you should skip ahead to the next section. Fair warning.
It’s pretty apparent from the get-go that Cove Holden is not quite “normal.”
For instance, though moving to a new town after his parents’ divorce would be hard for any kid, Cove is especially nervous and frightened of new surroundings and new people… or even new foods. During some early childhood conversations, he has a tendency towards bluntness, and seems to have trouble empathizing with the feelings of others, while getting easily overwhelmed by his own. There is even a DLC Moment in Step 1 titled “Runaway,” which is exactly what you think it is—Cove wants desperately to go back to his old home and his old life in which his parents were still married and everything made sense.
Finally, later on in the game, as a romance begins to blossom, it becomes apparent that Cove is also easily overwhelmed with certain forms of physical intimacy: he has great trouble even sleeping in the same bed with someone, let alone getting down and dirty.
Any guesses yet as to what kind of labels might apply to someone who fits this description?
I’ll cut to the chase. This is definitely a “spoiler” in the sense that the game doesn’t formally reveal it to the player until some bridge narration between Steps 3 and 4, but nonetheless the signs had been there since Step 1: sometime between ages 18 and 23, Cove is diagnosed as “on the spectrum,” i.e., at least mildly autistic.
And (another spoiler), along with being autistic, there is one other important label that Cove applies to himself a little earlier, in Step 3: he comes to realize that he is demisexual.
I have to admit that when I first saw this, I had no idea what demisexuality even was. It was a new concept for me and I had to look it up. Here’s what the lede paragraph on Wikipedia has to say about it:
Demisexuality is a term used to describe individuals who do not experience primary sexual attraction – a type of attraction that is based on immediately observable characteristics such as appearance or smell, and is experienced immediately after first encounter. A demisexual person can only experience secondary sexual attraction – a type of attraction that occurs after development of an emotional bond. The amount of time that demisexual individual needs to know another person before developing sexual attraction towards them varies from person to person. Demisexuality is generally categorized on the asexuality spectrum.
Apparently, though I am speaking well out of my depth here, it seems there may be some linkage between autism and demisexuality. I have not researched the topic enough to know for sure whether this is true, but it makes a certain amount of intuitive sense to me.
Regardless, these fairly central aspects of Cove’s personality are a brilliant bit of characterization, for a number of reasons.
First, they serve the utilitarian purpose of providing a legitimate excuse for the game’s omission—aside from a few short Patreon-only DLCs (I’ll get to those)—of any 18+ scenes, yet without actually skirting the issue of sex and intimacy. One might normally expect a pair of eighteen-year-olds in Step 3 to be going at it like rabbits. For Cove, it is all very much a process to be worked through, and it turns into a worthwhile aspect of the larger narrative. The game gets to have a wider distribution without the 18+, adults-only label, while not shying away from the topic of physical intimacy altogether.
Building off of that, Cove’s demisexuality is the perfect embodiment of Our Life’s whole ethos: that your physical appearance and identity, whether male, female, non-binary, transgender, etc., is so much less important than the emotional bonds you share with others. Here is a character who literally cannot find someone sexually attractive without prior friendship and romance. By simply being who he is, Cove reinforces the game’s thesis that romantic love is so much more important than mere sex.
More generally, and perhaps most importantly of all, these aspects of Cove’s character make him different from your typical romantic interest in a game like this, and hence make him feel more authentic and more real. Admittedly I speak from limited experience with love interests in visual novels, but I’m pretty sure that most of them aren’t mildly autistic demisexuals. And while Cove may be a bit clingy, a bit needy, overly sentimental and prone to tears, overall it’s hard not to adore the big softie. He’s just such a sweet and unique character.
Wilds swings in personality
I mentioned earlier in the “mechanics” section that Cove has a couple of sliding scales of personality that change between Steps based on how you play the game: studious vs. sporty, and warm vs. cold. My experience with this particular game mechanic was… interesting.
On my first play, Cove seemed to inexorably move toward being sporty and cold. I was curious as to why that was.
As to sporty, admittedly I remembered making one binary choice early on about how fast of a runner Cove and I both were: fairly fast. But that was the only choice that seemed to me to overtly apply to the studious vs. sporty spectrum. Meanwhile, as to cold, I theorized that perhaps I had been overall too “Direct” in my communication with Cove, and been too receptive to his neediness/clingy-ness, and hence had discouraged him from having a more “warm” attitude towards others.
Regardless, I changed almost nothing about Cove’s personality or appearance between Steps on the first play, since it felt a bit too much like “cheating” to bypass the effects of my choices on Cove. The only exception I made was to pick the hairstyle I most liked for each Step.
On a second play, I was interested to find that after Step 1, Cove had moved in exactly the opposite direction as my last game, and was maximally studious and warm (admittedly, as I already mentioned, I had skipped most of Step 1’s content on first play).
But then, somewhat to my shock, between Step 2 and Step 3, Cove’s personality had shifted all the way to the other side of both scales, so that he was maximally sporty and cold. I honestly have no idea how these behind-the-scenes calculations are made; they seem pretty inscrutable given that I felt I’d made the same sort of choices in Step 1 that I’d made in Step 2, yet with opposite results.
In the end I decided to manually shift both meters to the middle for Step 3, just so Cove would be a little different from my last play. I also decided to set him to high initiative instead of medium. As a result of changing all those things at once, I’m not quite sure if the differences that I noticed were coming more from the higher initiative or the greater warmth, but I get the sense that the former was having an overall greater effect.
When I saw Cove’s two meters for the final time between Steps 3 and 4, this time he had become maximally studious and cold. I kept studious as it was, since it was different from my first play, but again shifted him from cold back to the middle.
In a lot of ways it’s probably best that this stuff remains mysterious, or it could break the spell of the game’s seeming dynamism. Nonetheless, I can’t help but wish that I had even a vague understanding of how exactly my in-game decisions/responses were affecting Cove’s personality. At the end of two plays, I basically haven’t got a clue.
The four main story expansions
Time to transition specifically into the various paid DLCs. First up, the most important ones: the expansions to the main story.
As already mentioned, for Steps 1–3, the DLCs each add five extra Moments, doubling the total amount in each Step to ten. And while some Moments are, of course, more hard-hitting and satisfying than others, it must be said that some of these expansion moments are actually among the most key ones.
I already mentioned the “Runaway” Moment in Step 1. In Step 2, there is a Moment called “Soiree” that allows you, at 13, to take someone—either Cove or Derek (more on him shortly)—on your first real “date” if you’re so inclined. And in Step 3 there is a Moment called “Reflection” that reveals the backstory between Cove’s parents’ divorce. This last one, in fact, might be the Moment that got me the most teary. Now that I’ve played it, it feels like there would be a giant hole in the story without it. That applies to a lot of the added DLC Moments. Though I did enjoy my time with the DLC-less version of the game, I consider these expansions essential.
As for the Wedding DLC that caps Step 4, the only negative thing I have to say about it is that an awful lot of its runtime is taken up by actually planning your wedding together with Cove, along with a wedding planner. It’s full scenes of making all the wedding choices, and takes at least 45 minutes to an hour, if not longer. Not only are most of these scenes relatively uninteresting, but whole categories of decisions the game asks you to make are basically not reflected during the actual wedding at all.
For instance, there is a whole scene that involves going to a bakery and customizing your wedding cake. But the cake is never visually represented; there is only a single line during the actual wedding that specifies what kind of cake you ended up picking. Similarly, there’s a whole fairly involved scene about the catering, and whether you want a separate vegetarian or vegan or pescatarian menu, how many courses, the style of the plates, the available beverages, etc. And again very little of this is reflected in the actual wedding aside from a throwaway line of text or two.
I think that the devs may have done better to speed through some of the wedding planning aspects that have so little effect on the big day, while keeping only the decisions that are more noticeable, like the choice of venues for the ceremony and reception, and what clothes Cove is wearing while he’s getting hitched.
But as to the actual wedding ceremony itself… well. I cried during the vows, and I cried during a number of the speeches. The speeches of “Ma” (since you’ve got the two mothers, they are “Mom” and “Ma”) and of Cove’s Dad hit me particularly hard. In future plays I wouldn’t dream of missing it as a capstone.
So these four are very, very easy to recommend. In terms of price, the expansions to Steps 1–3 are $4 each, while the wedding is $3. They all go on sale fairly regularly for 30% off, meaning that if you’re a bit patient you can pick up all four for about $11. Money well-spent.
The Derek and Baxter expansions
These two expansions add two new possible love interests. Both are characters who show up in the base version of the game anyway, but the expansions allow them to be romanceable, and add five Moments of their own (though in both cases, one of the five is shared with Cove; e.g., you can take either Cove or Derek to the soiree, but not both). Derek’s Moments happen in Step 2, when you’re both thirteen years old, while Baxter’s Moments happen in Step 3, with him aged nineteen and you eighteen.
To explain my overall feelings towards these two DLCs, I’m going to go on what might seem like a wild and ridiculous tangent. Sorry, I like weird tangents sometimes, this is what you sign up for when you read one of my blogs. Sue me. It’ll make sense eventually.
I am of exactly the right age that the Lord of the Rings movies were important films in my childhood (it helped that I had read the books in middle school). I was in the middle of my third year of high school when Fellowship released, and I had never been so blown away in a movie theater before. RotK came out during my first year of college. I went to see all of them with my high school friends and had a blast. I saw them all in theaters 3–5 times each.
Anyway, there’s a bit in the special features documentaries of the extended edition of Fellowship in which various writers and executives are discussing editing the movie, and what a challenge it was getting it to under three hours, since they had so many great scenes. But it was producer Mark Ordesky who put most succinctly the philosophy that ended up carrying the day: the movie needed to be Frodo-centric. Stuff that didn’t have some direct relevance to Frodo ultimately didn’t belong in the final cut, good as it may be taken in isolation.
(And as a side-note to the side-note: the only extended version of the LotR films that is actually better than the theatrical cut is Two Towers. The other two are longer, but ultimately inferior. Fight me.)
And here I end the tangent in order to say: Our Life: Beginnings & Always is fundamentally a story about the relationship between you and Cove Holden, and the game is served best by remaining Cove-centric. Adding other romance options was, to my reading, a mistake from the beginning. Neither Derek nor Baxter can realistically compete with Cove, largely for structural reasons, but also due to aspects of their circumstances and personality (the latter reasons I will admit are more personal and subjective).
Let’s start with structural. Assuming for the moment that you’ve bought all the available DLC, then you have thirty Moments devoted mostly to Cove, and five each with Derek and Baxter. The sheer length of time you spend with Cove versus the other two is an impossible disadvantage. In a sense, it’s the difference between a long-distance relationship and someone who’s physically there with you. If there could have been double or triple the material with Derek and Baxter then things might have been different, but that was never a realistic prospect.
The other problem is that the “Moments” structure, in which you must necessarily manually select which Moments to play in what order, discourages an organic intermingling during Steps 2 and 3. I actually wish the game included a Moment randomizer, rather than making me pick which one I’d do next; that would go some way toward solving this problem. As it is, I think most players will tend to play all of Derek’s and Baxter’s Moments together in one go… at least, that’s what I did. In doing so, it all feels like a long and needless distraction away from the central relationship in the story—you and Cove—whether you decide to romance one of the other two guys or or not.
Perhaps if the “Moments” structure did not exist, and the game had more organically intermingled Derek and Baxter’s stories with Cove’s—and had significantly more of them—then Derek and Baxter could have seemed like more viable options. But in the end… not so much.
I also mentioned aspects of Derek’s and Baxter’s circumstances and personalities that make them harder sells. Again, this is probably more personal, and also a bit more spoiler-y, but here’s my top-level assessment.
The problem with Derek is two-fold.
First, while he and Cove, like you, are canonically thirteen years old in Step 2, Cove looks far more physically mature at this stage than Derek does. Cove could easily pass for a few years older, while Derek could easily pass for a few years younger. And unfortunately, Step 3 Derek does not exist in the game—canonically, he moves away and is never seen in the summer of your eighteenth year. And it’s just… a little hard to summon romantic feelings for a kid who looks like he’s about eleven years old, despite numerous signs that he’s crushing on you.
Second, Derek’s family is… a problem, so far as romance is concerned. It isn’t that they aren’t nice people. It’s that Derek has two younger brothers—Jorge (10) and Nicolas (6)—who monopolize most of his time and attention. Nicolas, in particular, hero-worships his big brother, copying everything he does. Their parents are both busy, and one of the Moments is spent with you helping Derek to babysit his brothers (what thirteen-year-old, I ask, would be into doing this? I was not that responsible at that age). Paired with his younger-looking appearance, again it’s hard to summon romantic feelings for Derek when he’s got a six-year-old worshipful younger brother constantly attached to his leg.
And as for Baxter…
Your first introduction to the guy is during the opening sequence of Step 3. He’s a rich nineteen-year-old tourist who’s renting the house next door for the summer. His defining characteristic is his forwardness and a haughty smirk, and the first thing he does upon meeting you and Cove is hit on both of you.
In a game in which by that point you’ve already spent 20 Moments with Cove (again assuming you’ve got all the DLC), who is shy, reserved, and sweet, Baxter showing up and immediately being this aggressive (and remember, you and Cove are likely dating at this point) comes off as at least rude, and almost obscene. My immediate reaction was wanting to tell the guy to fuck off.
Sure, the Baxter Moments reveal a bit more depth to him than you see in your initial encounter. But I really never warmed up to the guy and didn’t want to. It could be just me, I’m sure there are folks who are attracted to his type of personality, but I mostly just wanted to Swipe Left and send this guy on his merry way.
In terms of price, both of these expansions are $5 a pop. Once again they see fairly frequent 30% off sales. But personally, having played them both, if I do end up playing this game again, I’m going to skip both of them.
The 18+ Patreon-only “Bonus Moments”
The Steam version of this game and all its DLC consists only of non-adult, PG-13 rated content at most. But for those for whom the sexual side is important, there are two “Bonus Moments” released by the dev exclusively on Patreon. In effect they’re $5 apiece. One takes place between Steps 3 and 4 (at age 18), and the other takes place immediately after the wedding, i.e., your wedding night with Cove.
I found the first of these two Bonus Moments to be slightly disappointing in a number of ways.
First, it is not integrated into the main game at all, and is simply a whole separate application that does not take your previous choices into account. Compared to the rest of the game that is so good at reflecting your previous experiences, this was a letdown.
Second, there are exactly two new, XXX drawings of Cove in this Bonus Moment, and they have got to be my least favorite illustrations of the game. I didn’t find either one remotely erotic; mostly they just looked kinda bad. I found Cove’s main sprite infinitely more alluring than either of the exclusive illustrations.
Third, and this is very subjective, but something about the writing just felt… a little bit off. I of course can in no way speak to the developer’s mentality with this thing, and yet nonetheless it felt to me like a thing they’d done to fulfill a demand among the game’s fans rather than something they were actually interested in themselves. At times some of your own character’s response options felt too overtly dirty compared to the rest of the main game, like you were heartlessly pushing Cove beyond his comfort zone.
Lastly, FWIW, it doesn’t get beyond (*checks infrequently used metaphor to be sure*) third base.
All in all, the first Bonus Moment was… ehhh.
The second and final Bonus Moment, however, is something of a different story.
First, while it is also a separate application from the main game, it allows you to import your save from the main story. Pair that with the fact the you play this Moment after the main application completely ends—whereas for the first Bonus Moment you must actively remember to close the main game, play the first Bonus Moment, and then open up the main game again for Step 4—and it’s a Moment that slides in more naturally and easily with the core experience.
Second, there is simply more meat to this one. The Patreon post says that it is a 48,600 word script. I don’t know how this compares with the main game or the other Bonus Moment, but suffice it to say that it’s substantial.
Third, though this is quite subjective, to me there was none of the stilted quality of the writing that I perceived in the first Bonus Moment. It all felt totally natural and consistent with the rest of the main game’s story.
Finally, and this is the part that made it really great for me, it felt like this second Bonus Moment showed a growth for Cove that he himself had been pursuing. As previously mentioned,
Final Thoughts
Having played through Our Life: Beginnings & Always a couple of times now, it’s clear to me that this is a very special visual novel, and it’s easy to see why it’s so adored by its many fans. Cove Holden is an unforgettable and adorable character, and some of the other supporting characters who I’ve failed to even mention in this already rather lengthy write-up are almost equally memorable. While it’s not a perfect game, I have difficulty imagining another visual novel hitting me so squarely in the feels. I probably cried more happy tears during my two plays of this game than I have during all other video games I've played combined. I’m tearing up again right now just thinking about it.
So if you have any inkling that this game might even possibly be your thing, then I strongly encourage you to give it a whirl. I can only hope it’ll hit as hard for you as it did for me.