My husband and I have been playing a lot of Portal 2 — arguably the best couch co-op game of the modern era, despite the success of Hazelight’s It Takes Two, which also changed the genre forever. I could name a few more, and that’s about it. I’m not talking just about games you can play with multiple people locally. I mean games where you must work with a partner to get to the end, or at least to make the process more enjoyable. For those, in our house, we’ve made all kinds of games into co-op games.
We got the idea after playing through The Quarry, the playable film with lots of celebrities and a lot of characters to control. The game has a local co-op setting, where you pass the controller to the next player to make choices and try to dodge the occasional fallen tree. But we forewent this setting because were playing as a team, talking out each decision, sometimes pausing the game to think through a clue or recall earlier dialogue. We probably played The Quarry three or four times through like this, one of us with the controller, the other preparing our dinner in the kitchen. We took the same tack with Overboard!, the inverted mystery game where you’re the killer trying to evade being discovered — perhaps an even better candidate for this style of play given that it’s designed for replaying, with new goals and paths in each playthrough.
These non-co-op co-op games, which are usually narrative and have an element of decision-making, have become a go-to for our weeknights — and starting a new game is a great date night option in the winter. It also gives us a fun way to show each other games we’ve been enjoying. And, like all great art, experiencing the games together lets us connect over the stories, like when we cried on the couch at the end of Firewatch.
So yes, I’m very excited for Split Fiction, the next title from Hazelight. But I might be equally as excited for Expelled! — an upcoming game in the world of Overboard!, and surely one I’ll play with my spouse for many, many hours.
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