No início, julguei o jogo por puro preconceito - mesmo amando dating games -, mas quando eu decidi dar uma segunda chance, fiquei completamente obcecado! Não tem como não amar o Cove, mesmo ele sendo infantil algumas vezes. E digo com orgulho que comprei todas as DLCs. Essa visual novel simplesmente dá um sentimento quentinho no peito. A história é muito bem construída que, quando termina, você fica com um gostinho de 'quero mais!' e uma certa nostalgia do início do jogo. Ver o MC e o Cove crescerem e, aos poucos, se entenderem é lindo e gratificante.

Our Life: Beginnings & Always follows the main character (named whatever you want) from childhood to adulthood in the town of Sunset Bird and their relationship with Cove Holden. When it starts, you’re eight years old and Cove and his father have just moved in across the street. Naturally, being only two of a handful of kids in the area, you start hanging out. It’s a rough, emotional summer as you get to know Cove little by little and he deals with his parents’ divorce.

Then it jumps ahead to you and Cove being thirteen and spending another summer together. It’s full of new faces and more tense situations and decisions to make. It is shorter than the first part and felt quite rushed. After that, you move onto the summer after the end of high school and all that transitioning into adulthood means. While I liked the story and decisions in this part, I wasn’t fond of all of the characters introduced. They just got in the way.

Finally, there’s full adulthood. This part actually starts after the credits, so don’t leave yet!

Visuals

Our Life: Beginnings & Always looks great. The backgrounds are simple but really set the scene. The character design is also really nice. Everything is clear and crisp. The characters also have more dynamic faces than I’ve seen in other visual novels. They blink and change expressions when the story calls for it. No one is just static. The main character’s moms are pretty hot for drawings. Child Cove is also super adorable. Although something seems a bit off about Mr. Holden, but I can’t pinpoint what exactly.

There are quite a few different backgrounds. While the main ones are the house and the beach, we do get to see several other places in Sunset Bird. I think my favorites were the golf course and the Redwood forest; they just looked really pretty. The scenes also change a bit to show time passing.

I also appreciated that details mentioned in the text were actually shown in the scene. A character mentions a picture on the wall, and there is actually a picture on the wall. They mention having eight dining chairs, and there are in fact eight chairs at the table. It’s a small thing, but something I’ve been mildly annoyed at in other visuals novels. Why make a very specific reference only to not have it appear anywhere in the scene? Our Life: Beginnings & Always doesn’t have that problem.

Sound Effects + Music

I was pleasantly surprised by the wide range of musical tracks in Our Life: Beginnings & Always. It’s not the same song on loop, or even the same handful of tunes. Each scene has its own track which fits the mood and setting. Not that they don’t ever repeat, because they do, but there’s space in between so it doesn’t get annoying. I quite enjoyed most of the songs. They’re mostly calming instrumentals.

There’s some minor voice acting. The majority of the story is unvoiced, but occasionally a few words or a line will be voiced by the character. It was a nice touch, but it didn’t make much of a difference to me.

Gameplay + Controls

Our Life: Beginnings & Always does start with a text based tutorial which explains the ins and outs of the game, like how your choices affect how the story changes. You also customize your character’s appearance, which is quite fun, even though they never actually appear on the screen. You choose their name and pronouns as well, which is a nice touch, since anyone can insert themself into the story.

You get to make quite a few decisions in this visual novel and they do seem to affect what happens next. Previous decisions even get referenced in future text, which was surprising. The choices are all color-codeded (blue, yellow, green). As the tutorial explains, this are just to indicate a common mood/feeling if you want to stay consistent. You absolutely don’t have to though. Pick and choose whatever feels right to you no matter what color the option is. I do think it would be fun to only pick one color to see what happens, then do another playthrough and stick with another color, and so on. For my first time, I just picked whichever option I liked best.

There are also “moments” which are additional bits of story that you can play through if you want. They’re optional, as you can also choose to advance to the next phase of the story without completing them. There are five per phase, with more available as DLC. Since this was my first playthrough, and I wasn’t in a rush, I played through all of them. Each moment is pretty short (10-15 minutes) but gives you more insight into all of the characters. You also get to make several choices, and I wonder if those also contribute to how the story evolves. It seemed like some of these scenarios had “right” answers based on what followed my choice.

Replayability

Our Life: Beginnings & Always is totally replayable. Of course, you can make different decisions or choose different tones (direct, relaxed, anxious) and feelings (indifferent, fond, crush, love) to see what happens to the story. Or, like I mentioned above, you can stick to one color for the responses and play all the way through that way. Similarly, stick with the same tone for the whole story or the same feeling toward Holden. The Steam version also has achievements that you can go for which do cover most of these play styles.

Overall

I enjoyed Our Life: Beginnings & Always. The story wasn’t my favorite, especially during phase two, and the ending was abrupt. Some of that may have had to do with the previous choices I made, so perhaps it’ll be different next time. But overall, I was invested enough to stick with it and learn more about “myself” and Cove. I do think the optional moments are stronger than the main storyline though, so I wouldn’t recommend skipping those.

I also really loved how LGBTQ+ friendly the story was. The MC has two moms, you can pick your pronouns to start with. Later you can choose your birth sex, sexual orientation, romantic orientation, how you feel about your body, and you can even choose whether or not to date Cove. Just because he’s the focus of the story and presented as a love interest doesn’t mean you actually have to be romantically involved with him.

Was reluctant to finish this one, a very cozy and overall wholesome visual novel. Feels like the personification of a warm hug. The ability to determine aspects of both yourself, how others perceive you, and that of Cove himself gives the game some replayability especially since Moments have different outcomes based on how you roleplay. I also appreciated the fact you can set your relationship level with Cove at the start of each Step so if you just want to play a cute childhood friend sim without the romance elements you very well can though the romance path is really fucking cute that if I were to replay im not sure I would have the heart to do the "just friends" playstyle. My only critique, and this is more personal taste than anything, is that I wish you didn't have to stay so long in the "kiddie" phase like starting as a little 8 year old is sweet and has some nice call backs later on but it would have been nice to get to the adult phase faster. The next game seems to be fixing this a bit by pushing the ages up for the steps so that's cool.

fun fact about me, i have over 300 hours on this game on steam. this is my ultimate comfort game, as in i play it whenever i'm sad, whenever i'm angry, just to chill out and take a few deep breaths. cove for sure helps with that, i've never played a visual novel with such a caring and sweet love interest. not to mention the oodles of customization and callbacks to previous ingame moments! also the lgbt and neruodivergent rep is literally amazing augh okay i'm done now i swear o(╥﹏╥)o this vn means a lot to me okay.........

See, if you were to ask any of my friends what was THE thing I'd talk about in 2020, they'd all say Our Life. As a dating sim mega geek, I'll say this is the closest to perfection in the genre, as even with 100+ hours, I still find myself in new paths depending on the different sets of choices and feelings I pick throughout the game.

If you want to be obsessed over a green haired fictional man and ruin real life relationships forever because "They'll never be like Cove" then PLEASE, go play Our Life and you will NOT regret it.

Oh wow, where to start. This was such a wholesome game. I think the developers did an amazing job especially given the fact that the base game is completely free. There's also a ton of customisation available for players of all backgrounds. I really felt like it was me and my life.

I didn't expect to love Cove and the entire supporting cast as much as I did. The romance was well done. It started off slow, but you saw how they grew from being childhood friends by circumstances to friends who cared to adults who love and support each other. Dating sims have a habit of highlighting unhealthy relationships so I'm glad that their relationship clearly goes both ways. The game also didn't shy away from family and friendships. In particular, I really liked Mr. Holden's growth in the game.

My only particular gripe is that, for me, there isn't a lot of replayability. I made my choices as me and even if I were to do it again, I think I'd continue to make similar ones. Other than that, super enjoyable, highly recommended.

an entrancing moonlight dance between post-modern naturalism and mushy sentimental romanticism, this is unexpectedly great! for a free-to-play game with very modestly priced DLC that more than doubles the game's length, the depth and quality of writing and interaction here is seriously impressive; on multiple occasions i was genuinely struck by the little things the game picked up on and developed in interesting ways for both the player character and cove. when a character in step 3 commented on how i normally behaved one way but shifted that behavior in certain contexts, or how i would have the pc express outward disinterest in formal engagements but would have them throw themselves into them when they were presented, i was surprised and suddenly introspective in a way that felt extremely complicatedly real in a way i've scarcely seen from a game like this.

it's also a bit more thorny and dramatic than initial impressions might seem: while the game maintains a positive tone (in particular the adults around you are always supportive of whatever developing gender or sexual identity your character might have in a way that is nice but also feels like the part of the game most in tune with the wholesomecore aesthetic it sometimes toys with) and it's never going to spring something truly shocking or upsetting on this pleasant boat ride, you can choose to steer various scenes into rougher waters, if you so desire. some of my favorite scenes were a result of me choosing to do this, playing into the image i had built up of the player character being insecure and socially awkward in often kind of mean and selfish ways.

it's for this willingness to get real and dive into the friction it's scenarios present that the childhood segment ended up as the highlight: overall Our Life is a game about maturity and how people change, and starting off with a bunch of kids who are in turns deeply immature in very real ways and honestly bratty unpleasant is maybe the most unique and singularly well-realized part of the game. the rest of it is good too, with the teenager segment sagging a little bit maybe compared to the others, but for reasons i've talked about elsewhere I think it's the best part of the game and is instrumental to what makes it work. later scenes and conversations only work as well as they do because of the important groundwork laid down earlier, building to quiet, naturalistic crescendos of personal reflection and emotional development. the developing physical intimacy between the player character and cove on the romance route is something i found particularly powerful, as it's one of the few areas where the game puts it's foot down and had my character be realistically too emotionally immature to really get it, and when the two do eventually find a place that works for them, it really got me! our life understands i think that total comfort is ultimately suffocating: to truly appreciate how warm it is under the covers, you have to spend time away from them.

it's not going to be for everyone: i find myself wishing it asserted itself to the player a little more than it did: being able to manually customize cove's personality and appearance somewhat between steps feels like a step too far in player agency, and i'm glad that you can just choose to ignore that because it doesn't feel like the right way to engage with the game. in general, the game isn't particularly interested in challenging the player, which is fine, but it does mean that i can see it totally washing over some.

for me though, it was a surprising delight. there's a sequel in the works that seems to be aiming for less of a specifically romantic frame with more than one central character of interaction, and that has me seriously excited. cove is a really well-rounded character but i was surprisingly enamored by the entire cast, and a game that felt more able to explore that wider cast might have landed even better. very excited to see what comes next from this team!