I really enjoyed We Were Here with a good friend. It’s a coop escape room like puzzle game where you’ll play in different rooms but your puzzles interact with the other room and you’ll have to communicate and work the two rooms together to solve it
Something you might want to consider is that often boardgames nowadays have an electronic equivalent. Case in point, my best mate and myself recently played The Dresden Files over Steam.
I haven’t seen anyone say Enshrouded yet. Im hosting a server on wine/linux for my group. Its like Valheim but with more direction like a quest log and lore and etc. Lots of good reccs on the thread already too.
I’m in a similar situation with my wife not being particularly interested in games - I’ve had some success in playing LA Noire with her guiding the investigations and interrogations. The jazz soundtrack in particular helped convince her, funnily enough!
Not quite perhaps what you’re looking for, but may work for others with hesitant non-gamer partners.
I know its kinda crazy for me to.suggest this, but hear me out:
Hyrule Warriors Definitive Edition runs nearly perfectly in emulators on pretty modest hardware. Its not very difficult, but has a Games Journalist level Easy mode as well if thats needed. Its a Musou/Warriors game, so its basically mindless button mashing with the flavor of Zelda.
Its a splitscreen game, so you only have to have it set up on one machine. The game has a story mode and a bunch of challenge modes as well to keep things interesting. Wide range of upgradeable charaacters with different weapons that change up their playstyles. And a lot of unlockable costumes.
Downsides:
Nintendo
Have to use a controller (not a downside to me, but for sosme it is)
Getting the game can be a little challenging if you don’t know where to look
Setting up the emulator can also be challenging if you don’t know where to get the important parts
Can get stale after really long sessions of play
Upsides:
No account or extra launcher required, boot the emulator and play the game
Most emulators have decent to great Linux compatibility
Fully offline - no randos joining or server outages when internet drops
Only two players can play, meaning nobody else can join after your partner, and Player 1 controls when Player 2 joins
The only issue could be if you aren’t using a Nintendo controller, the buttons won’t match up, but there might be a mod for that. I know there are input mods for other games.
I also feel weird about it. “omg they updated a lot blah blah.” I believed them and loaded the game and it’s boring AF. I just assumed it’s a genre I didn’t like but it feels like it’s unworthy of praise for me too. You’re not alone dawg.
“and Hello Games never actually apologized for lying.” Good. I don’t want a corporate apology. Apologies from companies literally mean nothing. What matters is your actions. They have updated the game, for free, and still have no microtransactions. No third party launcher or account needed. Can be played offline. You buy the game, you get the game. That is RARE these days.
Should they have released the game in the first place? No. If you don’t support that, then don’t buy it. I don’t really like that, so I bought it on sale for like $30 instead of its full price of $60, which in my opinion was worth it.
There are plenty of problems in the gaming industry right now, I think NMS’s “redemption” arc is the least of your worries.
“They have updated the game, for free, and still have no microtransactions”
These are the good practices in a sea of bad actors, but that’s how the fans use Hello Games to attack the AAA industry by constantly misplacing and comparing it with AAA games, not to mention mythologising them, even though they have never asked for it. Once you recalibrate your perspective, you will see that long-term developments and updates are normal in indies; maybe that’s where Hello Games belongs?
What makes you so upset over people “attacking” the AAA industry? Most of the big AAA players release literal garbage, games filled with anti-consumer practices. Not only do they tend to release “unfinished” like No Mans Sky did, but they also have DRM, microtransactions, third party launchers + accounts that take your data. Who cares if they get attacked? I honestly wish people would do more.
I don’t really understand what it is you have a problem with.
I get that you are upset with AAA games. Honestly, I’ve managed to avoid them for a long time. But I think Hello games is not an ideal studio either; Murray did lie about the feature at release, the updates have only met minimum of professional standards, and 10 years later it is still a bland tofu of a space game, wrapped in years of technical debt, while NMS being a test bench for LNF as a fanbase look to the other way…they are doing ok…
I just find it funny that in a sea of garbage (not as a puddle), people will grab anything shiny and call it a diamond, while ignoring the gem cave by the shore and then ask, “What is wrong? Why are you laughing?”
The good devs never needed a redemption arc; never needed a cultural reframe to be good.
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
@Innerworld could you please add the link to the source(s) to your posts?
I guess you are just pasting the Astronomy Picture of the Day in here, which is nice. But maybe link to the relevant post (or its original source), so that people not aware of this can learn from the added context the sources provide.
These are the good ones (the ones where I felt like she was having a blast) which should run on anything. She’s also not good at games and has a fairly low-powered laptop. Looking back at them I can‘t believe we‘ve played that many lol
We‘re currently playing Schedule I but it‘s so buggy in co-op that I can‘t recommend it…
I’ve posted about this somewhere else too, maybe a different account idk.
But for games to play with people that aren’t really “gamers” I actually prefer single player games with light amounts of fast paced action or none at all. The “coop” comes from taking turns with the controller.
This works well with puzzle or logic games with generous reaction time requirements (again, or none at all), as well as story based games with light action. A lot of these games also come with natural pauses in the story that provide opportunities to either swap who is driving or put the game down for the day.
I’ve had a lot of success playing through many of these titles with partners. I’m sorting these roughly by category and then how strongly I recommend them. Some of these games I haven’t actually played yet, but I know them to fit the overall vibe.
Puzzle/Logic - no reaction time required
Chants of Sennaar (HIGHLY recommend, requires decent notes and map making, so the person not using the controller still has a job)
Strange Horticulture (HIGHLY recommend, also requires some light note taking to make life easier)
Strange Antiquities (sequel to above, have not played yet, high expectations)
Return of the Obra Din (have not played yet, high expectations)
The Case of the Golden Idol + DLCs (STRONGLY recommend, got a bit burnt out by the end, but very fun, also light note taking)
The Rise of the Golden Idol (sequel to above, have not played yet, moderate to high expectations)
Baba is You (HIGHLY recommend, nice learning curve but becomes brutally difficult towards the end of the game)
Myst (HUGE game, very good, but daunting and little to no hand holding, detailed notes required)
Kind of a category within a category, haven’t played these, but they’ve been referred to as 1.5 player games.
Spiritfarer
Chicory
Child of Light
Puzzle/Logic - aim and reaction time needed
Portal 1
Portal 2 (and its coop if you have 2 devices)
Portal Reloaded (community mod adding a portal through time with some seriously mind bending puzzles)
Portal Revolutions (another mod, haven’t played yet but looks fun)
Viewfinder (HIGHLY recommend, spiritual successor to Portal IMO and a very, very good game)
Superliminal (HIGHLY recommend, a “Portal-like” that uses perspective as the core mechanic)
Story Based - some action sequences requiring aim and reaction time and some puzzling
Stray (just a cute good time with some spooky, heart rate spiking moments where you really don’t want your kitty to get hurt)
Alien Isolation (if you’re horror movie people at all this is like an interactive movie)
Shadows of a Doubt (might be a miss for a lot of people, immersive detective sim)
Firewatch (played this a long time ago, might not hold up)
Dredge (spooky but cute fishing sim with good story)
Summertime Madness (not much reaction time needed, but still some aim or speed based puzzles)
All of these that I’ve played were on either Arch (custom), Arch (Garuda), or NixOS based systems under Proton. Two of those systems were installed from scratch and they performed flawlessly, so if you’re on a system that handles all the audio and video driver installation for you things should be very smooth. The Garuda machine is a laptop from 2016 that is plugged into my TV and actually saw the most play time for these titles. It held up perfectly. The other two systems were back to back installs on my fairly beefy desktop, but installation and running the games was smooth after the initial effort to get the systems fully functional with drivers and controller support.
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