We Were Here Before

We Were Here Before is an interactive fiction game in which you govern a frontier settlement that is already being forgotten. The Horizon pulses at the center of your table, bringing arrivals and events that no charter could anticipate. You read each account and make a choice that cannot be undone. Runs take 45–60 minutes, and the story has 24 arcs and over 120 possible endings, with four endings seen in each run.

Govern the settlement

Arrivals include a merchant who knows what you ordered before you place the order, a child who arrives three days before her mother, and an IOU for a name that keeps turning up in a bag of odds and ends. You decide how to respond, without seeing numerical stats; the consequences emerge through what happens to the settlement and its people. Choices include whether to open or seal a vault, pay a debt or find a clause that makes it unpayable, and tell a settler what is happening to them or keep it from them.

The settlement and the frontier remember your decisions. The Bureau of Metaphysical & Philosophical Research has opinions about your actions, but no jurisdiction to act on them.

Build a legacy

Your choices leave resources—bureaucracy, memory, prosperity and fragment—that become the settlement’s foundation. Place them on a grid to raise frontier dwellings, a town square, a market or an archive. When a story concludes, it gives you a Legacy District named for what you did, such as A Counting House, A Quiet Survey or The Certain Garden. Find a place for it on the grid: what you build reflects how you governed.

The Horizon and the Bureau

The Horizon eventually takes every settlement. Across runs, details from previous stories can return: a name you chose may surface in a stranger’s mouth, a closed branch may appear on a path you did not take, and echoes from ended settlements can cross back over the boundary. Each return carries something the frontier left with you, as you try to understand what the Horizon wants and whether it can be stopped.

When the Horizon finishes its work, the Bureau of Frontier Settlement Assessment & Proposal Division issues Form 7-C, a bureaucratic obituary assembled from your choices, the districts you built and the governor you became. It is a document, not a score, and may refer to decisions you have forgotten. The Bureau files it whether or not you read it.