9 Most Inventive Video Game Levels You Need To Play

5. The Guardian - We Were Here Forever

The We Were Here series offers up some of the most innovative co-op puzzling that the genre has seen in ages and 2022’s We Were Here Forever pushes the creative needle even further. Set in a medieval castle as two explorers seeking to escape, you’ll encounter a series of increasingly convoluted and challenging puzzles.

One such puzzle has you encounter The Guardian, a, well for lack of a better description, gigantic octopus kind of thing.

In this section one player enters an escape pod that takes them right up to the creator’s eye, or mouth, or both. Another stays inside the submersed bathysphere. The player in the pod can interact with the creature and hear its statements while the one inside has a translation station of sorts. One of the primary ways to communicate back and forth is for one player to try to replicate the gurgles and utterances of The Guardian while the other uses a runic sound pad and dictionary to find a match.

It’s a tricky exercise but one that will have you proving mastery over your ability to communicate with your co-op buddy and congratulating yourself when you pull it off.