Civ 6, the whole Picross lineup on the switch (emulated ofc), Cassette Beasts, Minecraft Java (which can be a pain to setup but once its good its good), Halo MCC apparently has a new split screen mod. You get a lot with a switch emulator due to all the fantastic first party games by Nintendo. Also look into Nucleus Coop.
Plus 1 for cassette beasts, it’s insanely good. Much to the continued anger of my friends with hundreds of hours in Pokemon, I routinely summarize it as Pokemon but good having hundreds of hours in both lol
Oh Minecraft. She’d get bored with an open world sandbox. Maybe there are mods or something that are more story driven, but that’d ruin my nostalgia for the game. Bit of a pickle!
I’ve recently gotten into putting together sort of silly “party” mod packs for my friend group. Things that are meant to be played as a “one shot” with everyone online. Things like full loot randomizers, or shared health and inventory. Just silly and chaotic mods to shift the focus from exploration and sandbox-y things, to “let’s try to beat the ender dragon under very adverse conditions”. So far I’ve only gotten one friend to bite, but we’ve been doing one run a night for the last week or so. Takes between 20 to 60 minutes, maybe more if we really get into it.
Could also look into mods/modpacks that add quest books. That helps take the edge off the “open world, figure it out” paralysis and give some concrete things to work towards.
Abiotic Factor has been a blast with a friend. I don’t play a lot of survival games (I prefer more narrative than most offer, and Grounded was a great one for that) and this one doesn’t take itself very seriously (you craft weapons and armor from general office supplies a lot of the time… I’ve never been so excited to find a cache of staplers).
May want to turn the difficulty down if she gets overwhelmed easily, as while they majority of the game is pretty manageable, there are the occasional hard fight.
I’ll take half credit! Lol. It’s ridiculous in the best ways. I still have no idea how much longer we have on our playthrough but it is a pretty long game… Or we suck, which is very plausible.
I tried to get my friend group into this and most of them bounced off. I tried to convince the “hardcore gamers” of the group that by the looks of it things get quite hard in the late game. Bummed I never really got to experience it to that point.
Sorta requires another account… technically… .Minecraft. IDK, maybe hytale would fill that niche. There’s also some FOSS options like luanti that would be nearly indistinguishable.
Left4Dead2
Portal 2
No Man’s Sky
Some lesser known stuff:
Core Keeper
Dungeon Defenders
RoboQuest
Valheim
Category suggestion: Kart racing. There are no shortage of brands of that… sonic just came out with a new one and there’s a couple really good sonic kart racers already out there that are on steam and console. Played a lot of sonic and all stars racing transformed with my wife and we had fun… it goes super cheap on sales and has remote play together so you’d only need one copy for both of you… isthereanydeal.com/game/…/history/#price-chart:ov… , mario kart, etc.
es-de is a really nice front end you can have in steam for couch coop emulation, I hear.
Grabbing it for a fiver is like a no brainer if you get into the style of game. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a sale when the patch comes out to promote it.
It’s really hard to suggest games without knowing what you guys normally would play. You mention puzzle games. There are a ton of two player puzzle games that you play head to head which might be fun, but it isn’t coop exactly. I highly recommend super puzzle fighter ii turbo. It’s available thru emulation and I think maybe on steam via that capcom arcade thing. There are lots of games that fit into that category if it ends up appealing.
If you have access to any of the games mentioned… maybe just have her try some of them and see what clicks. I know with my wife she wasn’t really a “gamer” at first… and I just let her loose on my steam games and a few that she would have never considered before became favorites like half-life, portal, l4d2. Most of the valve stuff holds up really well and makes for good primers into FPS style gaming. We also got really into coop minecraft and dungeon defenders so hundreds of coop hours have been dumped into those. I’d pick a bunch of genre styles (fps, puzzle, survival, etc) and just show her some gameplay videos if she’s reticent to play them sight unseen… see if anything sparks her interest. Then pick out some of the more well regarded titles from them to dive into. There are definitely classics that are considered classics for a reason.
As for roboquest… I’ve enjoyed that one. The dev kept putting out content patches so it’s gotten a bunch of content dumped into it. Fun solo and coop. I personally love the pop art comic style. The progression is rogueLITE… so you’re slowly building up new stuff in your hub as you play, which makes for a nicer experience, IMHO. They even have a free demo on steam if you wanna try it out while you wait for a sale.
Tbh, that’s just the difference between someone who has nostalgia for a game and someone who doesn’t.
I played Pokemon Red as a kid. I replayed it dozens of times since and it’s always really fun. Just feels good.
I didn’t play Pokemon Gold as a kid. I tried to play it quite a few times and never got throught it. Objectively, Gold is a much better game than Red in every regard. But I don’t have nostalgia for it, so it’s just an old game with bad UX, outdated gameplay and weak graphics to me. Can’t get through it without getting bored and quitting.
HL2 was revolutionary, 22 years ago. Nowadays it’s just woefully outdated in every respect including gameplay.
As OOP says e.g. about physics: That stuff was amazing in 2004, but it really isn’t in 2026. Almost every shooter includes physics and in many cases better physics than HL2 did. In part because game designers have learned from HL2 and other games and improved upon it.
I would agree with you in theory, however I am the same age as Half-Life 2. I never got around to playing it until it was already an old game (11-12? MAYBE 13). I played other shooters before, like various CoD games, Bioshock Infinite, etc., but they never clicked with Me. They obviously took great influence from it, every shooter did, but I could tell even as a kid that they didn’t do it as well
Yeah I should’ve mentioned my last 2 are single player. We took turns after each death and it was super enjoyable. Using the controller and navigating is only half the battle with those two games. The other half is just brainstorming and planning a solution to the puzzle.
Since you mentioned platformers, Rayman Origins might be worth a look. It’s a 2D platformer from 2011 so it doesn’t require a lot of power, levels take a few minutes to complete so it’s perfect for short sessions and it has local co-op (up to 4 players).
I tried it recently on my desktop (Pop!_OS, ubuntu based) and Steam Deck, played without issues on both of them.
Older games are purely singleplayer, multi is something they leaned on later on. For PC Rayman Legends also supports local co-op, I believe. This one however is only available on Steam and requires Uplay account or linking your Steam to it. Origins is available on both Steam and GOG - I can confirm the latter version does not require any additional accounts or services.
Finally, there’s Rayman Raving Rabbids but that’s more of a mini-game compilation/party game rather than a platformer. It also has multiplayer.
Maybe. I like a farming sims but I think it might be a hard sell. Though the cute graphics might help. How in the going in to town portion of the game? Does it have RPG elements? While I like that kind of thing, I don’t think she will.
Not really though I get how the game seems like it might be like that, in fact what I like about Farm Together 1 and 2 is that they are very focused on the actual moment to moment process of a running an arcadey farm. It is almost like a realtime boardgame or simple economy simulator, which makes the core gameplay loop immediately salient to anybody. You can pick up a controller, jump in and start helping out on the farm, it is a very simple, relaxed and rewarding gameplay loop and it makes the perfect co-op game because of it. There aren’t long cutscenes and lots of stuff and context you have to explain, it is a pick up and play experience.
It isn’t a shallow game either, while the game by no means “hard” in the sense that there aren’t really fail states, figuring out how to create an economy with your farm is a really interesting challenge and the wide variety of unlocks encourage and reward strategizing. The graphics are deceptive, there is a genuine engine building game at the heart of Farm Together 2.
These two were the top two favs of my wife and I last year. Played it takes two on our steam decks, and split fiction on our PCs. One of them is older and handled it great. Both pcs run linux.
I heard puzzle games and am legally obligated to shill Petal Crash (and it's upcoming sequel). It's a great accessible entry point into versus puzzles, and tbh it's practically the only good thing to happen to the genre in a decade or so.
Can also check out Panel Attack as a FOSS clone of Panel de Pon, and FightCade for emulating all kinds of classics with netplay.
Do you like puzzle games? I played Blue Prince with my wife and that was pretty fun. She’s not much of a gamer, so I just drove and she took notes. We talked about decisions/speculated on puzzles together.
For the last decades they are a second party developer at best. And Nintendo owns 1/3 of the Pokémon Company. And another third is owned by Creatures which is independent from Nintendo only on paper.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne