Screenshots
Watch trailer on Steam ↗We Were Here Before
Inkdrift · Published by Inkdrift · Official site ↗
Content notice: We Were Here Before contains themes of psychological horror, cosmic dread, and existential loss. The game explores memory distortion, grief, and the erasure of identity and history — including a storyline involving a parent grieving a child whose existence cannot be verified. Narrative content involves a cult-like organization, ideological manipulation, and unexplained disappearances. There is no sexual content, graphic violence, or depictions of self-harm. The game's horror is atmospheric and psychological in nature rather than explicit or visceral.
2 user reviews — 100% positive (2 reviews) · 56 achievements
Last updated 28 Sept 2026
The frontier does not want to be settled. A narrative highly replayable story game where your choices build a settlement, shape its story, and seal its fate. Every run ends. Every obituary tells a story only you lived.
£12.46
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Price history
Indie, Simulation, Strategy · 2026 · More £5 - £15 games
About this game
We Were Here Before is an interactive fiction game about a frontier settlement that is already, quietly, being forgotten. You are its governor. You have been here before. The Bureau has prepared a briefing.
It is closer to a Choose Your Own Adventure journey. There are no deep mechanics to fill time, and no fail states where you lose. It is designed for those with a love of reading, allowing leeway for the player's imagination to fill in what the game doesn't explicitly explain to you.
Each run will take 45 - 60 minutes. With 90+ story endings, and four seen each play through, it creates a large replayable experience.
You will govern.
A frontier settlement needs decisions made. The Horizon pulses at the center of the table — when it breathes out, something arrives that no charter prepared you for. A merchant who knows what you ordered before you ordered it. A child who arrived three days before her mother did. An IOU for a name, found in a bag of odds and ends, that keeps coming back. You will read what arrived. You will make a choice. You will not be able to take it back.
You will build.
Every choice leaves something behind. Resources — bureaucracy, memory, prosperity, fragment — spill from the decisions you make and become the settlement's foundation. Drop them on the grid and something rises. Frontier dwellings. A town square. A market. An archive. When a story concludes it hands you a Legacy District named for what you did: A Counting House. A Quiet Survey. The Certain Garden. Find it a place on the grid. What you built is what you governed.
You will compromise.
You will never see a stat. You will see consequences. Did you open the vault or seal it? Did you pay the debt or find the clause that made it unpayable? Did you tell the settler what was happening to them, or decide they were better off not knowing? The settlement remembers. The frontier remembers. The Bureau of Metaphysical & Philosophical Research has opinions about what you did and no jurisdiction to act on them.
You will be filed.
When the Horizon finishes its work, the Bureau of Frontier Settlement Assessment & Proposal Division issues Form 7-C — a bureaucratic obituary assembled from the specific choices you made, the districts you raised, and the governor you turned out to be. It is not a score. It is a document. It will reference things you forgot you decided. It will be more honest about you than you were. Read it, or don't. It will be filed either way.
You have been here before.
The Horizon takes every settlement eventually. That is what it does. That is what it has always done. But something persists — a name you chose once, surfacing in a stranger's mouth. A branch you closed, gleaming on the path you didn't take. An echo from a settlement that ended, leaking back across the boundary. 24 story arcs. Over 120 possible endings. You will see four in a run. Each time you return you carry something the frontier left in you. Perhaps this time you will understand what the Horizon wants. Perhaps this time you will find the thing that makes it stop. The Bureau has its doubts. It has filed them accordingly.
Governance is the thing you do between arrival and the obituary. The Horizon is patient. It has been here longer than the Empire. It will be here after.
System Requirements
Will my PC run this? →Minimum
- OS: Windows 10 64-bit
- Processor: Intel Core i5-6600 / AMD Ryzen 5 1600
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD RX 480
- DirectX: Version 11
- Storage: 500 MB available space
Supported Languages
Latest news
Patch NotesOfficial
Hotfix v1.0.02
Fixed a silent error during .exe compilation that caused some of the shaders to not compile. No more ugly white box artifacts.Read full article on Community Announcements (Salami Slammer)Patch NotesOfficial
Patch v1.0.01
Fix for buildings not being visible on the game board.Read full article on Community Announcements (Salami Slammer)AnnouncementsOfficial
One Month To Release - And What Is This Game?
With NextFest done, I want to take a few moments to reflect on the data, my beliefs, and why I've even made this thing in the first place. The first thing to know? WWHB is all about the story. To enjoy it, one has to have a love of reading, enjoying building up in your own head the story you want to shape and live. It lacks deep mechanics. Filler puzzles. In depth recipes and crafting. These have been done far better than I could manage in many other games.As you can tell, I'm not writing this to sell you on my game. I'd rather you play the demo and see if you are one of the admittedly small demographic of people that really have enjoyed it. The demo? It takes about twenty minutes. Many bounce. But about 15% of you? Played it for over an hour and a half. A small handful played it more than I ever would have if I wasn't making it!It is a game that has contradictions within the writing. A game about the recursion of time, of a funky place in a frontier of an unamed Empire where things just don't operate quite like they should. It's a game that never really gives clear answers. It's meant to encourage you to come up with your own truth of what it is and why, and I get that isn't for everyone.But what still needs to be done over the next month is:trimming some of the stories, especially the obituary. It's about 33% too long right now.Making some of the more subtle mechanics noticeable.Registering achievements with steam. They are all in the game, its just about the wiring.Finishing the last three story arcs.Reviewing the existing stories for about the 1000th time and surely changing my mind on some details probably were in draft 232. ;)As for me, and this journey, it's the writing I enjoy. It's the story telling. And don't get me wrong - I love many types of games! Each type is great in its own way. And in the end, I'd rather make something that a few handfuls of people feel passionately about and most just don't care for it, than have something a large variety of peopl...Read full article on Community Announcements (Salami Slammer)AnnouncementsOfficial
A Settlement You Cannot Save
A Settlement You Cannot Save We Were Here Before is coming to Steam Next Fest — here's what to expect, and what not to. We Were Here Before is a roguelite about a settlement you cannot save. That's not a difficulty warning. It's the premise. Most roguelites ask whether you can survive the run. This one asks a different question: what will remain when we're gone? You are a governor sent to the edge of a strange frontier to build a settlement that will, eventually, be lost. There is no health bar for the settlement. There is no game over. What you produce, choice by choice, is a record — and when it's over, that record is filed, in triplicate, as an obituary by an imperial bureau that does not have the correct form for most of what you did out there. With Next Fest coming up June 15–22, I'd rather be honest about what you're walking into than sell you something this isn't. What it isn't I'd genuinely prefer you bounce off the demo for the right reasons than wishlist for the wrong ones. So, plainly: It is not a survival game. You cannot lose the settlement — losing it is the story, not the failure. It is not a combat deckbuilder. There are cards. You will not fight anyone with them. There is no resource panic. No optimization treadmill. No meter ticking quietly toward death. The Horizon — that countdown at the center of the screen — is not a threat. It is a pulse. It is the rhythm the frontier breathes at, and each time it turns over, something happens. There is no correct ending. There are several. None of them are winning. If "the number went up" is the feeling you play for, this will frustrate you — and I'd much rather you discover that in a free demo than after a purchase. What it is A narrative-first roguelite where the story is the loop. You build districts by dragging resources together — no recipe menus, no crafting screens, you simply place things and the settlement grows. In between the building, the frontier produces moments: small choices, quiet beats, and ...Read full article on Community Announcements (Salami Slammer)AnnouncementsOfficial
Language Design as a Discrete Discipline
BUREAU OF FRONTIER SETTLEMENT ADMINISTRATION Inkdrift Development Notes — Filed: April 2026 Language Design as a Discrete Discipline On writing a game where the prose is the mechanic When you make a game that is almost entirely text — no combat, no platforming, no puzzle that can be solved without reading — the writing stops being content and becomes architecture. Every sentence load-bears. Every word choice is a design decision. The prose is not describing the game. The prose is the game. We Were Here Before is a bureaucratic cosmic horror narrative card game. You govern a doomed frontier settlement. The settlement will inevitably be lost. What remains is a personalized obituary filed by a bemused imperial bureau — a bureaucratic record of who you became as a governor. Every run ends in a different document. The document is the point. Making it required developing what I now think of as language design — a discrete discipline sitting between writing and game design that has its own rules, its own failure modes, and its own craft. This is an attempt to document some of what I learned. I. The Weight of Sentences The most important decision in WWHB was the staccato structure. Short sentences. Almost uniformly. The Bureau does not explain itself. This was not initially intentional — it emerged from the game's aesthetic — but once it was established, it became a load-bearing rule. Short sentences carry weight individually. Longer sentences distribute it. In a text-heavy game where every word must justify its presence, the short sentence is the default unit because it forces each thought to stand alone. Consider this passage from The Prior Record, one of the game's story arcs: The Administrator has stopped working. She stands in the archive room holding a register. The register is ours. The dates inside are not. Someone has been keeping records here for twenty years. We arrived three months ago. Each of those sentences would work differently in a longer construction. "We...Read full article on Community Announcements (Salami Slammer)
