Puzzle mechanics
Every puzzle is built from three ingredients: information only one of you can see, a tool only one of you carries, and a rule about time, gravity or space. When you are stuck, stop describing the problem and start describing the room.
Every puzzle in We Were Here Tomorrow is built from the same three ingredients: information only one of you can see, a tool only one of you carries, and a rule about time, gravity or space. Once you can name which ingredient is missing, you stop being stuck and start working.
What "asymmetrical" actually means
The developer's own phrasing is that "no two Explorers experience the facility the same way". In practice that produces four distinct situations, and each one needs a different response:
| Situation | What it looks like | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Split information | Both of you are looking at the same system, from two ends | Read your half in full before the other one acts |
| Split location | You are in different rooms with no line of sight | Establish a shared landmark: a colour, a sound, a floor number |
| Split state | The same room behaves differently for each of you | Ask "what has changed for you since I last asked", not "what do you see" |
| Split capability | Only one of you can affect the thing | The other one becomes the reader; do not swap roles mid-step |
Most confusion comes from treating a split-state or split-capability puzzle as a split-information one. If your partner insists the door is open and yours is closed, you are not disagreeing about facts — you are in different states, and that is the puzzle.
The two tools
The achievement list names the toolset plainly, which is rare and useful:
- Hook Gun. Documented use: grapple to an Energized surface (Danger! High Voltage). It is a traversal and anchoring tool. Anything glowing, humming or labelled as powered is a candidate anchor.
- Goop Gun. Fires the Rift-derived mineral the facility's leaked research notes call goop: a crystal that "can expand, contract, and alter its structure when in contact with one of the earlier found organisms", refined into a tool "capable of forming temporary structures through controlled crystallisation". Documented uses: gooping your partner (Goop Lookin') and locking them in place (You're Chatty for a Statue).
Temporary and controlled are the operative words for both tools. Nothing you make with them is permanent, and nothing you make is random: if a goop structure collapses, it was the wrong structure, not a bad roll.
The three rule families
Time. At least one sector is built around loops: Eternal Recurrence is an achievement for getting stuck in one. If something repeats, the repetition is the mechanic.
Gravity. Relativity is an achievement for exploring "impossible staircases". Geometry that looks wrong is the puzzle, not a rendering bug.
Space. The Rift is a spatial anomaly; by Sector 6 you work beyond it, in the outpost the achievements call Farpoint.
The five-step rescue
Run this in order. Do not skip to step five.
- Stop touching things. Both of you, hands off, for sixty seconds. Most stuck states are an input that landed in the wrong order and left the system in a state you have not read yet.
- Re-describe the room, not the puzzle. Each of you describes what is physically present: surfaces, panels, lights, sounds, exits. No theories, no "I think".
- Swap the describer. Whoever has been talking goes quiet and the other one takes over. This alone resolves a surprising share of stalls because the stuck pair has been confidently describing the wrong object.
- Check the tool. Both of you fire your tool at something. A tool you have forgotten you are holding is the single most common cause of "there is nothing here to interact with".
- Walk backwards one checkpoint. Retrace to the last achievement that fired and look for a physical step you skipped. The checkpoint list in the walkthrough hub is the map for this.
Talking to each other under pressure
Two phrases that do more work than they look like they should. "Say the shapes, not the names" — symbols that read as letters to you read as different letters to your partner. "Nothing changed on my side" — silence is data; a step that produced no feedback did not complete.
When it is genuinely a bug
It happens, especially in a launch-week build. Two signs it is the game and not you: an input produces a sound but no state change, or a checkpoint achievement fires twice. In that case, both of you return to the last checkpoint and re-enter the room together — the co-op session state is what desynchronises, not the save.
If it persists, the developer's support page and Known Issues page are the official channels, and the contact page here will get a correction into this site.
