I don’t know that we’ve ever seen a year quite like this one when it comes to new co-op experiences. From major-publisher-backed hits like Split Fiction and Grounded 2, to indie darlings like REPO and Peak, there hasn’t just been a significant quantity of games meant for co-op play, but they’ve gone in so many different, yet similarly exciting, directions.
Still, I’ve been left wanting for one specific reason, and I imagine other parents can relate: It’s hard to find games to play with my kids, so I’m glad Lego Voyagers is just around the corner.
Split Fiction, for example, may be regarded as the best co-op game of the year and, more broadly speaking, a possible Game of the Year contender, much like It Takes Two before it. But Hazelight’s co-op games aren’t meant for smaller, less-experienced hands. Their puzzles and action sequences demand a lot from players, to the extent that I can’t play it with my six-year-old, who is a lifelong gamer, but still finds such games a bit too chaotic to handle. And then there are games like REPO, a game about repossessing valuables from locales stalked by monsters, and Peak, where Boy Scouts scale mountains to reach help after a plane crash, but often plummet to their cartoonish deaths. While I’m personally okay with some of the more mature visuals and themes in these games and play them with my older child often, they can still ask too much of my youngest on the controller, and that’s if their anxiety-inducing gameplay doesn’t undo her.