Our Life: Beginnings and Always

Our Life: Beginnings and Always is a nostalgic, choice-driven visual novel that lets players design a custom character and follow their development and relationships across distinct life periods, including a long-term relationship with the neighbor Cove Holden. The title emphasizes personalization of name, appearance, personality, and pronouns so each playthrough feels unique; the main narrative is free while optional expansions add extra scenes and a voiced-name feature.

Key Features

Our Life: Beginnings and Always presents four distinct life periods that chart personal growth and relationship phases, each with its own scenes and player choices that influence character development over time.

Robust character customization lets players choose name, appearance, personality details, and pronouns (he, she, they), with options to adjust how the character is presented as the story progresses.

The story is choice-heavy and focused on the evolving relationship with a single primary love interest, Cove Holden, where pacing and outcome depend on player decisions and branching paths.

Text appearance controls allow players to adjust font style and size for comfortable reading, and an optional voiced-name feature adds spoken name lines to increase immersion.

The game contains a large script designed for long, replayable playthroughs with branching endings and ongoing character growth.

Advantages

Deep, personal storytelling reflects player choices and changing character traits across multiple periods of life, providing an emotional, slow-burn narrative experience.

High replayability comes from branching dynamics, relationship pacing options, and many customization details that affect NPC memory and interactions.

The tone remains warm and supportive, allowing characters to express difficult emotions and be met with understanding rather than punishment.

The main narrative is free to play while optional paid DLCs expand the story; the first three DLCs are priced at $3.99 each and a fourth expansion was released at $2.99 in 2022.

Disadvantages

The game contains mature content in later portions of the story, including strong language, crude humor, and suggestive themes, and is intended for mature audiences.

Romance options center on a single primary love interest (Cove), which may feel limiting for players seeking multiple romantic paths.

Some additional content requires purchasing separate DLCs, so full access to all scenes is not included in the free main story.

Market Performance

Our Life: Beginnings and Always offers roughly 397,000 words of narrative content, which translates to about 16–24 hours of playtime depending on choices; the game is positioned as a long-form, replayable visual novel with optional expansions for players who want more scenes and features.