[Beware spoilers for BOKURA: planet.]
I’m terrible at deception games. I’m bad at lying, and I believe everyone should have access to all relevant information to make decisions that benefit the collective good. So I was terrified when tokoronyori’s 2025 co-op game BOKURA: planet required me to do just that. You and your fellow player’s spaceship crash-lands on an alien planet, and you each receive a secret, life-or-death goal to accomplish before the game ends. The catch? Achieving your objective requires completing puzzles that demand trust and cooperation with the one person whose interests may directly conflict with yours.
How far can trust stretch when survival hangs in the balance? Acting selfishly is “the primeval state and is evolutionarily stable” (Hamilton, 1981), leaving little incentive to act otherwise. Early on, Yellow Player encounters a local parasite that has survived on this planet by a brutal calculus: attack or be attacked. The parasite assumes Yellow Player will strike first, so it seizes control of Yellow’s body before giving them a chance to act. The parasite wants Blue Player to host its offspring but can’t simply ask, convinced that honesty means death. Cooperation requires favorable conditions that don’t exist.
Blue Player faces similar constraints. The game explicitly warns him that his fellow astronaut Rika “specializes in manipulating people’s emotions and will exploit any desires or feelings thrown her way.” Combined with his criminal past, Blue Player has learned to trust no one. His mission—kill Rika, sacrifice himself, and get his son (Yellow Player) home alive—further isolates him. Both characters independently conclude: “From now on, if there’s anything I can’t let him know, I should think in my head like this, without saying the words out loud.” Survival has taught them that deception isn’t a moral failing; it’s a necessity.
I struggled with this framing because I’ve always believed we should act for collective benefit, not individual benefit. Communities thrive through cooperation, not isolation. Earth is home to many symbiotes, surely this alien creature could find something similar. But mine is a perspective of profound privilege because I’ve never had to lie or manipulate to survive. I don’t know what it’s like without the luxury of asking for help, and this creature doesn’t know what it’s like to have that option available. As philosopher Thomas Nagel once said, I can describe what it might be like for a human to be a bat, but “I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task.” The parasite experiences this revelation upon inhabiting Yellow Player: “By obtaining the brain of a highly intelligent creature like a human, I perceived how large this world was for the first time.”
This inability to truly grasp another’s experience becomes Yellow and Blue Player’s greatest obstacle. Without understanding what drives the other, neither can assess trustworthiness. Both fear that honesty will doom their missions. They become what game designer Nicky Case calls Cheaters, individuals acting solely in self-interest. When two Cheaters act in their own self-interest at the expense of the other (the Prisoner’s Dilemma), they both lose, and each loss reinforces distrust, creating a death spiral of mutual defection.
Luckily, cooperation can emerge in hostile environments via three conditions: repeated interactions, non-zero-sum stakes where both players can win, and low miscommunication.
BOKURA: planet exemplifies this non-zero-sum game with two moments of vulnerability. When Blue Player develops a headache, Yellow Player finds them shelter. Blue Player responds by sharing chocolate rations and asking Yellow about themselves. This small exchange sparks something in Yellow Player: “I should be honest with myself. I’ve started to care for this guy… I have started feeling what is called friendship toward him.” Later, when given fuel for the return trip to Earth, Blue Player confesses he’s known all along they couldn’t both leave. Yellow Player thinks: “What should I do? … I’ll tell him my circumstances and go to Earth with my child. I know that guy would accept us.” These moments don’t erase self-interest, they expand it to include the other person’s welfare.
These incremental acts of empathy and reciprocal altruism transform Yellow and Blue Player from Cheaters into Collaborators. They learn that trust can be a strategic adaptation that unlocks outcomes impossible through pure self-interest. The parasite, previously incapable of imagining cooperation, discovers new possibilities through inhabiting human consciousness. Blue Player, conditioned by criminal survival, finds that vulnerability can be strength rather than weakness.
BOKURA: planet forced me to confront an uncomfortable question: Would I trust a stranger with my life? Playing the game from a position of safety, I found the choice straightforward. But genuine trust requires risking real loss, and I’m less certain I’d choose cooperation over self-preservation when actual survival was at stake in ambiguous circumstances. The game’s genius lies in making this tension visceral, showing that perhaps the question isn’t whether to trust, but how to create conditions where trust becomes possible.
