You wake to learn you didn’t have a son. You never had parents. You were a blank slate—alone. An assassin for hire. Your memories are not your own. Your true past is a blank—lonely, purposeless, nothing worth protecting. You sit in the cave, with your former son asleep. You didn’t ask to know. You know your love for him was fake, and it hurts—why? It never belonged to you, yet you felt it, anyway. You are not the only one who cannot trust what they know about themselves.
Thomas Nagel’s What Is It Like to Be a Bat? asks you to consider a bat—an organism with an entirely different sensory system (echolocation compared to vision). We can understand everything about the bat physically—its brain, biology, and behavior—in objective scientific terms, and yet never accurately describe the subjective experience of what it is like to be a bat. Nagel’s concern is what objective knowledge can and cannot capture about subjective experience. And while his writing is not about trust or love, BOKURA: planet asks what happens when his problem stops being philosophical and becomes personal—when the mind you cannot access belongs to your crewmate, your son, or yourself.
You eventually reach a puzzle where, while split from your crewmate, you see a foreign robot begin to walk in the air. You describe over voice chat what you’re seeing, with your friend bewildered, assuming the robot’s hostile. Only after watching their walking mechanics do you ask your friend to stop moving. When the robot stops as well, it hits–the robot is your friend, navigating a completely different map than yours. They can walk through walls and even seemingly kill themself from your view, but they live in theirs. To move forward, you each have to cooperate and describe what the other needs: you standing and jumping at the right place and time, and they moving objects in your world to a seemingly meaningless spot in theirs, but crucial to your success. You have no way to experience their world or see their screen. All you have are words to grant access to the other’s world and trust to fill in the gap between your worlds. Nagel’s concern isn’t abstract here. It is the screen between you.
However, the split doesn’t stop at the screen. It continues narratively and privately. You both receive hidden objectives that the other cannot know. Your task is to find and kill Rika, the third rogue crewmate, and send your “son” home safely. Your friend, taken over by a parasitic alien, wants to protect his dying son by finding a host—you. You both move forward anyway, keeping these objectives secret. You keep solving puzzles together. The trust between you keeps growing. If cooperation still flourishes in the presence of hidden objectives, what does trust actually require?
Nicky Case’s Evolution of Trust argues that you don’t need to know everything about the other person for trust to evolve—you just need the right environment. You need to build a relationship, find win-win scenarios, and communicate clearly, forgiving miscommunication rather than assuming betrayal. BOKURA: planet builds exactly that environment: every puzzle forces communication, cooperation, and mutual stakes. Trust didn’t emerge because you knew everything about your friend—it emerged because the game made cooperation the only path forward, until trust followed naturally.
You stare at them, wanting to reveal the truth. After everything—the puzzles, the beasts, and the bodies in your wake—you want to tell them the truth, only for a child screaming to interrupt you. A child appears, only to disappear, leaving only a landmine. You look to your friend to save you, but they push you, and you lose your footing as you watch your friend take the explosion.
You stand over them sobbing, asking why. Their response? “I don’t know—my body acted on its own.” With their last breath, they ask you to care for their son. And in that moment, the child parasite jumps on and takes over, killing you in the process. You are left asking what they meant. The game ends, and the ambiguity sets in. Did they push you because they loved you, or was the parasite protecting its son’s future host? Was “take care of my son” a genuine request or a manipulation? You will never know. Nagel’s concerns return here at their most personal and most devastating. But it doesn’t matter. You still felt sad when they died. You cried, anyway. The relationship was real, even if its origins were inaccessible.
Nagel argued there is a limit to what objective knowledge can capture—another’s subjective experience remains fundamentally out of reach. BOKURA: planet takes that limitation and makes it a condition of the relationship. Our minds—our partner’s, our own—may not be fully knowable. But they are not obstacles to connection. They are where you find it.
