My SO and I have been having a lot of fun playing co-op games on the Steam Deck connected to the TV. We recently finished Split Fiction and I’m looking for the next cool experience to try out. We enjoy casual co-op games, nothing too hard or violent. EDIT: pixel art is apparently a big turnoff for her so that’s out as well.
Games We Enjoyed:
- Split Fiction
- It takes two
- Untitled Goose Game
Games that flopped:
- Stardew Valley - She is open to “farming” games but doesn’t enjoy the energy management aspect of the game. It also gave her motion sickness, somehow
- Overcooked / Moving out - We enjoy these games but as they start to get more chaotic and hard, the enjoyment goes way down
- Ibb & Obb - A bit dull and samey
- Portal - Gives me serious motion sickness, completely unplayable
- Lego Lord of the Rings - I’m a lord of the rings fan but I hated the gameplay for this game, I found it to be so boring. We quit after an hour or so.
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Broaden your horizons, start using emulators.
Star Wars: Jedi Power Battles
Kirby and the Forgotten Land
Super Mario Wonder
Any of the Warriors games (just don’t buy it, don’t reward them for releasing the same damn game 20+ times)
Legend of Mana (highly recommended, please don’t sleep on this)
Destroy All Humans 2
Ratchet: Deadlocked
Divinity: Original Sin
Resident Evil 6
Halo: Master Chief Collection
Lego Star Wars
The Tales games are long and go up to 4 players. I’d recommend them if you have more people to join.
Be prepared for a few roadbumps while you acclimate yourself to using emulators. It won’t be smooth at first, but it gets easier the more familiar you become with it.
Unravel 2 :) It’s a beautiful little co-op game with lots of puzzle-y problems to solve and some dynamic ones as well
It went on sale yesterday so I ended up buying it!
Would be great if you updated this post with new games you enjoyed 😊
We got a puppy so gaming has been pretty much non-existent… We did try a few games, but none of them were good enough for me:
-
Phogs: felt very repetitive
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Unraveled 2: Can’t really say what turns me off but it really doesn’t spark joy for me. The puzzles just feel uninteresting and with no purpose.
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Lovers in a Dangerous Space Time
Manage your malfunctioning space ship together while fending off waves of enemies.
Very fun.
I’m a fan of taking turns “driving” for slower paced logic or puzzle games. Titles that come to mind:
- Myst
- Curse of the Golden Idol
- Summertime Madness
- Chants of Sennar
- Superliminal
- Viewfinder
- Baba is You
I can highly recommend all of these as they almost universally benefit from more minds working on them together. I would say Baba is the only one that gets REALLY challenging, but there are good mind and logic bending puzzles throughout them all!
EDIT: I’ll also add that Myst, Golden Idol, and Chants of Sennar (Summertime Madness maybe a little) all benefit from solid note taking and map making This provides a great job for the “copilot” while the other person is managing the actual input device.
Obra dinn too
No game makes me feel more like a complete idiot than Baba is You. Great game though.
Yeah, it’s a game I chip away at. I’m at a point in it that the levels often take hours and/or multiple sittings to work out.
My girlfriend and I do the same but with more simplistic story heavy games. We just finished Slay The Princess and it was an amazing experience like this.
My SO isn’t that big of a gamer but these are the games we’ve played together:
Lovers in a dangerous spacetime Battleblock Theatre Octodad
I don’t know how the tolerance for difficulty is for you guys but I think it’s worth a look
Lovers in a dangerous spacetime (i.e. Space bunnies) is a great, light, up to 4 player arcade game
My partner and I find it a bit awkward with just two of us
Spelunky 1 & 2
Monster Prom, Monster Camp, Monster Roadtrip
Also seconding Kingdom: Two Crowns
OP asks for “nothing too hard” and you recommend spelunky, you absolute monster.
Fortunately I already made that mistake once, a friend recommended me Spelunky 2 as a casual mining game…
Blur…from archive.org
We enjoyed A Way Out. Gonna try Sea of stars soon.
Death Squared. Puzzle solving, each player controls two blocks on the map used to solve the puzzle.
Keep talking and nobody explodes could be a fun one, only needs 1 device and the other player needs the manual which can be on a phone or printed out. You could even play it over a phone call.
As I recall, the ‘campaign’ gets impossible to do with two players because of the inability to look up enough stuff in parallel. There are mods and custom bombs though.
Check out Kingdom Two Crowns. Absolutely brilliant
This one looks for me, actually :P
If you like puzzle games, you might try a game that’s not technically multiplayer but that the two of you can work on solving together, which is what my wife and I do. Good candidates for that are Case/Rise of the Golden Idol, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, and we’re currently playing Blue Prince.
Baba Is You belongs to the same category. One of my favorite puzzles.
I have Baba Is You! It’s a brilliant game, love it to pieces, but it’s not a good fit for my SO. She’d lose interest very fast, looking for something more chill and casual.
Blue Prince is definitely something I’ve been considering but I’m unsure if she’d enjoy games that are just puzzles. Pretty sure Lorelei is just too thinky for her to enjoy.
Definitely looking into more chill games to blow off some steam.
A way out. Two criminals escaping prison, made by the Same studio as it takes two and split fiction. Full of mini games along the way like the other two and my god the story made me laugh with it’s ridiculousness. it’s definitely not as good as it takes two or split fiction but well worth a go imo
The steam deck status is unfortunately unsupported. Otherwise it would be a great fit.
A Way Out is marked as “Playable” by Valve, mainly because of Origin (or EA App nowadays?) and some quirks with the controls. Should play just fine though and once in-game controllers should be well supported.
In case you’re comfortable trying a couple things out it does work for some on steam deck. ProtonDB link
Tinkering is fine, I’ll definitely check it out. Thanks!
My wife and I were having fun doing co-op on the Trine games. Coordinating your character switches to cross obstacles can be pretty fun. The Lego Star Wars games were also fun for us both to just mess around and cause chaos.
Lego Star Wars are quite bad for motion sickness, I find.
Trine sounds like a great idea, I already have the first two. Gonna give it a go.
We tried the lego lord of the rings game but it fell flat for us.
