This two-player co-op adventure is a magic tool for teaching communication skills

polygon.com:

Ever since I was a child, I was entranced with the idea of parallel worlds. One of the first games I ever played was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. With the tap of a button, Link could teleport from the emerald green fields of Hyrule to the Dark World, a barren land ridden with monsters. Bokura, a new two-player co-op game from Tokoronyori (listed on Steam as ところにょり), continues this tradition but introduces a cooperative twist. Instead of teleporting, players must engage with Bokura as a pair. Each player occupies a different world, from which they must work together to solve puzzles that involve both environments. The premise is deceptively simple, but the game pulls it off marvelously.

Bokura starts with two boys playing a Pokémon-like game called “Pakémon” on devices that look like Game Boy Colors. As the two play, they talk to one another, sharing their own personal struggles. The boy wearing a green sweater comes from a wealthy family, but his parents don’t care about him. The other, clothed in blue, talks about his busy working mom and her boyfriend. The real game starts when they decide to channel their malaise and destroy a local statue.

Together, the two boys — guided by me and my player two — walk through pixelated woods and solve puzzles that involve pushing boxes and other items, like piles of hay. While walking through the forest, they encounter a dead deer that causes them to each pass out and wake up in a supernatural world. Unbeknownst to the boys, each one of them now exists in a unique fantasy space. In my playthrough, I walked through a rugged mechanized world where the two characters looked like robots. My friend got to explore a more cartoonish-looking land in which the characters looked