My partner and I occasionally play games together, but they pretty much only play word puzzle games on their own. I’m not very good at word games though, and they don’t have very good spatial skills, so we frequently find ourselves mismatched. We have a switch and a single decent gaming pc, and a pretty old laptop.
The biggest hit for us has been Baba is You because it is slow paced, and combines words and logic and spatial reasoning. Our biggest problem was that its not actually coop, so we would just alternate who played, which can disengage the other person. My partner also thought its aesthetic is cute.
Our next positive example is probably Snipperclips is also a pretty slow paced puzzler, is mostly spatial skills, but we could play at the same time. They also liked how interactive the avatars are, and particularly snipping my avatar up.
The first miss is overcooked, it was a bit too chaotic, and my partner felt a little lost and uncoordinated. They don’t remember it super well, so we might retry this one at some point if they feel more at home playing video games.
The other miss is Mario Kart, which they liked when we played with 4 player, but not just the 2 of us. I’m significantly better at Mario Kart, and they are pretty competitive. If they get more into games they might be willing to put in some time improving, but not so much right now.
Our worst miss was probably Tricky Towers, I’m decently good at regular Tetris, so I can do okay out of the box at physics based Tetris, but there was too much happening to fast for my partner. Combine that with it the competitive aspect and they didn’t enjoy this one at all.
The games they most fondly remember from childhood are Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero, though we have downstairs neighbors under part of our apartment and no dance pad or guitars, SSX Tricky, and the Lord of the Rings movie tie in games.
They think they’d enjoy a game that does movement as input like ddr or guitar hero but is maybe less bouncy, and are open to action games, or games with a story, but they should be easier to control and not be too chaotic. Cute aesthetics and cats are a plus.
Thanks!
Edit: Everybody gave great recommendations! We picked up It takes two and pizza possum. Just finished the first chapter of it takes two and we had a blast, and I might even be able to get another game night in this weekend if we can be on top of chores. I’ll keep checking in this thread for more ideas for future games to try! Thanks again!
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Haven by The Game Bakers
Late to the thread, and you already have loads of suggestions, but Portal and Portal2 may help your partner with their spatial issues. I’ve heard that those are the games to use to introduce someone who doesn’t play videogames in general, but specifically FPS, to the media and basic controls that most of us gamers take for granted.
Yes! A very fun game to play as a couple! I liked how it was more graphically interesting than a lot of other puzzle games, and dialog is fantastic.
NOPE. This might work for some people but my partner couldn’t handle it :/. When walking around in 3D and paying attention is hard portals are just too hard when thrown into the mix. I would kill to be able to play Portal 2 coop, but alas :C. Maybe Portal 2 would be better to start on, they do a better job of introducing some concepts and the story is harder to completely ignore lol.
“It Takes Two”, check it out.
My wife and I loved that.
I also recommend this game as one of the best co-op / split screen games I’ve played.
Lego games like Lego Starwars has already been mentioned and I will second those (especially the newer ones that have split screen).
Divinity Original Sin is also great.
Honestly most games I can think of have already been mentioned and those who have not seem like they might not be that great of an option since it seems your partner isn’t normally into gaming. (RTS in particular might be too hard)
But I will suggest some anyway just in case
Starcraft 2 has free online multiplayer which includes a COOP vs AI mode.
There’s also a 2 player campaign adaption of Warcraft 3’s normally single player campaign. Although it might only be available for pre-Reforged.
Also I didn’t know about it before now, I googled it just in case, but apparently SC2 also has COOP mods for its campaigns.
You mentioned having a Switch so I will recommend Advance Wars Reboot and Wargroove 1 & 2, although there are no COOP campaigns but you can play multiplayer maps.
Besides Advance Wars Reboot Camp on Switch (or the originals for Gameboy, which you could play with emulator), there’s also an online fan site called Advance Wars By Web where you can play advance wars in the web browser, although there’s no single player.
Wargroove is also on Steam and besides the campaign and regular game itself there are puzzles.
And speaking of Puzzles, card games tend to have Puzzles. I haven’t actually played Magic, Yu Gi Oh, etc. so I can’t say for sure whether they have any, but there’s puzzles in Faeria. (I would’ve recommended Might and Magic Duel of Champions, it had some great puzzles, but Ubisoft shut that game down many years ago)
Also StarCraft 2 can be modded with MassRecall so you can go through the SC1 campaigns, more than just SC and Broodwars, in the SC2 engine, which makes them a bit easier and more satisfying. I think that would allow you to do co-op on the original single player campaigns.
Stardew valley
This didn’t really work for us to be honest. It went a little better than most games, but it was too easy to get separated and do your own thing and it just didn’t really feel like we were playing together. Could be a strength, but I don’t think it’s ideal if your partner doesn’t really like video games haha.
I think they have to get to the point where they mightbplay a video game on their own before stardew valley would land for them. They weren’t particularly inspired by the trailers.
It’s $15. Buy it, start a co-op game on the switch and hand them a controller.
Trust me.
My partner didn’t “do” video games growing up. Till Stardew.
This is the way.
Checkers
In terms of coop games with cats in them: Aqua Kitty is an option. More of an underwater action game, could be too fast paced.
If you ever return to Overcooked, some versions of the game have a Practice Mode you can go into. You can’t progress levels with this, but you can serve out dishes at your own pace, which feels nicer.
An old top-down shooter I enjoy is Assault Android Cactus. Players can revive themselves if they die, the only cost being that dying makes it hard to keep up a certain rate of kills needed to clear the level without the Battery draining out.
At a long stretch, there are visual novels like Pizza Game that are much more fun with your own voice acting applied, largely due to the horrendous stupidity of the whole cast.
Still play SSX Tricky with my family via an emulator
What’s your favorite thing about that game? I still know one of the people who created it
We’re competative I suppose. Grew up playing and nothing ever replaced it. There’s probably other arcade games we’d enjoy but the closest we’ve come was the Tetris Effect - but we haven’t picked that up again for a while. Tricky is one of those games that has a huge skill difference between being good and actually practicing. It’s fun, a bit janky - maybe it’s just what we know. My brother has a couple high scores on my steam deck and writing this has inspired me to go spend some time trying to beat them lol
Glad you are enjoying it. Any advice on getting it up and running on a steam deck? Just got one a few months ago and havent looked into emulation yet but intended to, life just got in the way and havent gone back to it yet. Maybe you can inspire me to get my some old tony hawk games running. Loved the ps era skater games
Yeah, there’s something called Emudeck, it makes setup super easy. Even comes with tools to add emulated games into your steam library to launch like a regular game.
There is this one funky caveat - the PlayStation and Switch games I emulate didn’t run very well, after some research I found out that lowering the CPU cores helps a ton. And it did, they run great for me now. To do that I had to install a Deck extension called Powertools - super easy to do because Emudeck came with a user interface to install plugins, Powertools included. Anyway, with Powertools you turn off this thing called SMT and then can lower the CPU cores. Some people think it’s actually a bug in emulation or Steam Deck drivers because using less cores shouldn’t have a big impact on performance so it may not be necessary in the future.
Tons of video examples on YouTube make the install and setup super easy. Highly reccomend setting emulation up, I’ve been playing through games I never finished as a kid and it’s been great. The convenience makes it awesome
Can you thank them for defining a huge part of my childhood playtime? My siblings and I bonded over that game. We still quote voicelines from it.
Can do Choss
We Were Here and its sequels seem like the perfect slowish paced coop puzzle games for you guys.
Operation Tango and Escape Simulator are similar and also great.
A Way Out is similar to It Takes Two, with a more serious story.
Monster Prom/Monster Camp and The Yahwg are co-op visual novels.
Clandestine is a Co-op stealth game where one player plays as a spy, fps style, while the other plays as a hacker providing overwatch by controlling cameras and doors, giving directions, etc.
Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is another asymmetrical co-op game where one person is trying to defuse a bomb by solving puzzles and the other is trying to help by reading the manual. The defuser has to tell the other person what’s going on so they can give the right instructions, much sillier than it sounds.
I love we were here an there are several sequels
Divinity: Original Sin 1 and 2. It’s not on the switch, but I’m guessing it should run fine on your old laptop since D:OS1 came out in 2014. My wife and I love these games since she isn’t very good with fast action, and these are turn based fighting so she can take her time figuring out what to do to whom.
It’s also got great couch co-op.
I love dos2 and bg3, if we can work up to those I would count that as a huge success
Dos2 is on switch
Yep, my partner also did not enjoy the “misses” on his list, but we had a blast playing divinity original sins 1 & 2. Now we are 100 hours into Baldurs gate 3. I highly recommend these games for couples.
Surprisingly, though, while more fast paced, she did also really enjoy It Takes Two. It is a game that does try to be a bit accessible for the new player.
I genuinely think getting a Wii U would be an awesome idea too, massive libraries made of just games that are perfect for this situation.
I have a Wii U in storage at my parent’s house, I might see about us checking some games out when we visit for the holidays in a couple weeks. I don’t want to overwhelm them too much though.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is a must have imo. Me and my girl play it almost on the daily. Great competitive experience.
I think this is gonna have the same problem as mario kart, so I probably need to wait until they have some more game experience. Last year when I had my last smash phase they enjoyed the music being on in the background though.
My time at sand rock is kind of like stardew, but 3d and I liked it better. I haven’t tried the multiplayer , but the single player was fun.
Baldur’s gate 3 is a huge game of the year smash hit. Good coop. Turn based combat. Local split screen. Probably turn the difficulty down if you don’t care for DND rules and just have fun.
Audio surf I believe has co-op. It’s a fun little toy of a game, but not very deep. You steer a car over a track generated from your music
I’ll look into My time at sand rock, stardew didn’t catch their interest when we were looking at trailers and such earlier tonight.
Love bg3, I think that could be in the cards maybe a game or two down the line!
Audiosurf is a blast from the past! That was one of the early games I played a lot of on steam, it might be a good low stakes option sometime.
Overcooked is only fun if everyone is terrible or everyone is great. It’s a great concept but definitely not going to work out for most groups.
For Mario kart, did you put on some bots? Without the NPCs, 2 player is lame, even if you are both quite good.
Have you played It Takes Two? This sounds like it hits your requirements.
For couch coop, I’d actually suggest Mario Deluxe over the very recent Mario Wonder if you wanted to try a side scroller. Wonder is great, but it’s couch coop is poorly implemented unless you are both good or both terrible as with overcooked. Deluxe doesn’t have that issue, in my opinion, due to the way the scrolling works in game. It might feel odd spending $60 on a 10 year old game from the WII U, but Nintendo originals always hold up well.
I think they struggled to even parse what was going on in overcooked, and need more experience playing games generally to be able to enjoy that kind of chaos because they just felt lost.
Alas, beating bots on Mario Kart means nothing to them.
That’s 2 fast recs for it takes two, so I think thats probably gonna be on the shortlist.
I think I have NSMBU on wii u in storage at my parent’s house. We’re visiting in for the holidays, so maybe we’ll hook up the wii u there and try that. I remember liking that game a lot.
Thanks!
I actually think that’s what they called Mario deluxe for the WII U. Definitely look into it before buying a 2nd copy of the same game like I did. I mean, I’ve 100%ed it a few times now but still I wish I knew it was the same.
In fact, it’s better on the Wii u. Player 2 can either play as a Luigi or play as god on the Wii pad. Putting down tiles and making the game dead easy.
Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime - coop, a bit actiony but less chaotic than Overcooked. Beautiful and cute artstyle.
Fantastic game, my family has been playing it for years on Switch, starting from when my kids were uselessly young, to now that they are pretty good gamers and it has always been fun. One of the few games my wife plays with everyone.
This was my first thought too. Highly recommend.
I think this is one we’ll check out. I bounced off it a few years ago, but I think that was because I played it in a party where I was more interested in just hanging out and catching up with the other players.
