The Kids We Were review: a sweet, heart-warming time-travel adventure

Back in the mists of time of 2013, a bunch of Japanese developers got together to make a series of short 3DS games called the Guild series. Headed up by Ni No Kuni makers Level-5, it had some pretty big-name contributors: Keiji Inafune, Goichi Suda, Yoot Saito and Yasumi Matsuno among others. But there was one game that stood out to me as something really quite special. It was the considerably less well-known Millennium Kitchen’s Attack Of The Friday Monsters, a sweet slice of life adventure that saw you play as ten-year-old Sohta walking the streets of his small Tokyo suburb on a hazy summer afternoon in 1971. It was a tender celebration of childhood nostalgia and imagination, with just an inkling of some menacing undertones, both from the people Sohta meets in his neighbourhood and the titular Friday kaiju monsters that may or may not exist in the real world.

I mention all this because The Kids We Were is probably the only game I’ve played since then that’s even come close to capturing some of that Attack Of The Friday Monsters magic. You won’t find any kaiju here, but this is a similarly nostalgic portrait of pastoral Tokyo, as viewed through the eyes of young Minato on his summer holidays, first in the present day and then in the 1980s when he ends up travelling back in time Back To The Future-style to when his parents first met as kids. With three days to right past wrongs, this is one of those gentle, coming of age tales that leaves you feeling warm and fuzzy in all the right places, even when there’s no real ‘game’ to speak of.

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