We Should Talk
Review

We Should Talk (2020) is a short narrative game about working the night shift in a bar dealing with romantic advances and your disgruntled partner. Like other narrative games you choose conversation responses that have consequences. Unlike other narrative gives, here you construct precisely what to say from series of fragments. As you juggle work and texts from your boyfriend, this detailed approach to conversation makes it feel like every response counts -- which in fact, it does.

You play by responding to other characters with the "sentence spinner" to create modular sentences from scratch. Each response is important as you struggle to express yourself and deal with ongoing life and romance stresses with your partner Sam, and the friends and strangers who come to the bar.

This unusual approach both expands the number of things you can say, and also offers a chance to craft responses to connect more deeply to the people you are talking to. Will you be accommodating, flirty, standoffish, or somewhere in-between? Depending on how this goes, it can drastically affect the way people respond to you and ultimately lead to one of many different conversations and 9 different endings.

The result is an experience that mirrors the difficulty of communication. "We should talk," could mean very different things in different contexts and with different tones. Even with the odd cheesy line delivered unironically, the genius is how those other characters then have to interpret what you've said and make decisions about how they respond. It really feels like you are having an interaction with a person who is paying attention not only to what you are saying but how you are saying it.

Our examiner, Andy Robertson, first checked We Should Talk 16 months ago. It was re-examined by Jo Robertson and updated 5 months ago.