Ma[PSV]Rch Day 7: Along Together is a simple 3D puzzle game that makes for a pleasant VR diversion

This series: Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4.

Along Together is the game that made me stop and ask “wait, do I actually like PSVR as a platform?” I bought one at launch, messed around with it a bit, and mostly wrote it off, but other than Dexed and to some extent Tetris Effect, every game I’ve played on it this month has been…fun? I suspect that what may have happened was that PSVR launched without enough good software and I just bailed too soon. I’ve kept buying games when I saw them cheap, and I’ve kept meaning to mess around with the thing again, but never did because it’s kind of a pain to set up and strap on. Now that I am actually giving it another chance…it’s been good. If you told me when I was hunting for a PS5 for two months that I would get one and it would sit unplayed while I messed around with $15 PSVR games on my PS4 I would have thought that either you were insane or I was on my way there. But here we are, and I don’t feel crazier than usual.

Along Together is a simple 3D puzzle game. It looks like a platformer but you can’t jump (or fall of platforms, or die) so I don’t think it’s fair to call it that. The basic set up reminds me of Moss, where you control your character through the analog stick and your disembodied hand in the world through motion controls, but unlike Moss you don’t have to physically grab items to manipulate them, just point at them and press a button while you actually move them with the analog stick, so in actuality this is more like a Wiimote and Nunchuck set up than anything else. It almost looks like a high-res Wii game too, with bright and simple environments and cute little animations. The game has a fixed camera placement but it moves along a track as your character advances through the level, unlike Moss’s diorama set ups, and while the automatic movement made me very slightly queasy at first I did adjust to it.

The ‘plot’ of the game is as simple as can be, and has been done in a billion games over the years. You’re a child, your dog is missing, you have to go out on an adventure to find it. There are 3 worlds in this game, forest, mines, and junkyard, of progressing difficulty. They are all abstracted out into puzzle levels where your child character walks towards a goal and you and she manipulate things in the environment to clear a path. Everything you can push or pull has a little six sided symbol on it, and they range from gears to mine carts to logs, all of which either directly act as platforms for your character or move platforms elsewhere in the environment. Your character can also flip switches or trigger pressure plates, some of which require constant pressure and some of which are permanent triggers. There’s also a slingshot that you can use at certain predetermined points to trigger other switches, because of course there is. I will give the developers credit for the cute visual of your character holding up their fingers to make an imaginary slingshot while you control the real one. It’s a nice nod to the game’s conceit that you are the child’s imaginary friend as they are on this adventure. Like Moss the kid does recognize your existence, but she only speaks a made up language and only really talks to the dog, Riku, who you encounter in various levels. When you see Riku he is always on an alternate path where you must move something into place for the so he can trigger a switch that opens up your path forward and rinse and repeat.

Along Together is not a great game. It gave me a terrible first impression, both with a weird technical issue where the camera was way further from the action than it should have been so that I was clipping through objects in the back of the level and from the boy character (you can choose gender) whose voice was so annoying I immediately quit out of the game, deleted my save, and switched to the girl, who I found much more tolerable. The first world’s puzzles are so easy that it seems like a game aimed at kids the age of the main characters, so about 6, but thankfully the later worlds are challenging enough to be engaging, even if the game never offers up any true brain busters. The music is simple and pleasant, the graphics are clean but unremarkable, and there’s nothing about the game that makes it anything more than an average puzzler. It even has some semi-serious technical issues, including a collision detection error that allowed me to move a platform when I should not have been able to and ended up with my character stuck in space vibrating while another UI element inexplicably grew to the size of the entire environment like a black hole opening to swallow everything and some very unpleasant audio played. I almost thought that this cheery children’s game was hiding some dark underbelly but it was just poor QA. There were a couple other unpleasant audio bugs as well that played sounds way too loud, which really sucks when you’re using headphones. I got stuck on a late puzzle because the game can be inconsistent about how you can interact with certain things, and it took me about an hour to finally figure out what it wanted me to do (I tried to look it up but this is too obscure a title to have easy solutions available.) I don’t think that would have happened if it were more technically sound and less finnicky in its collision detection.

But despite all these complaints…I really liked Along With You. Something about being in such a cheery and happy place in VR is very nice, and the ability of VR to situate you within the level physically just makes everything more immersive. The main menu is a model of the child’s room and every level has a collectable, which fills in a toy shelf next to you as you find them, including what is clearly a Game Boy with a playable game on it. It’s kind of a mix between Flappy Bird and VVVVVV, a simple diversion but kind of neat nonetheless.

The VR stuff isn’t essential here; you could absolutely make this game with a normal screen and not lose anything of real value, but it makes it feel fresh. It’s only a few hours long, but I got it on sale for $10 so it’s hard to complain about that. I finished it in one day, went back and cleaned up the trophies to grab the platinum, and immediately deleted it from my hard drive. It’s not something I’ll ever need to play again but my time with it was mostly enjoyable.

I’ve played a lot of games like Along Together over the years, and you likely have too. Something about doing it in VR is different. Whether it’s the immersion, the ability to fine tune the camera by moving your head, or just the novelty of it I can’t say. It might be a combination of all three. But even with the game’s issues, and its overall average quality and been there done that design, I had fun guiding the little girl through the relatively simple levels. It was a pleasant diversion. The ability of PSVR to elevate an average game to an above average experience makes me rethink my relationship with the platform. Maybe I like it more than I thought I did when I began this a week ago.