Cooped up in co-op.
with my favourite player 2. ♥
I haven’t played and reviewed many solo games these past few weeks, mostly because I’ve been heavily invested in gaming with my husband. Sure, these games are fun to play solo, too - but sharing them with someone you enjoy spending time with makes them just that little extra special.
This week, I bring you: my (current) favourite co-op games to play with my husband.
The Planet Crafter
The Planet Crafter is one of my favourite games altogether, merely because of the visuals. The entire planet is handcrafted, not just once but in various stages through which your planet evolves as you terraform it. For this, I consider it a pure work of art if nothing else.
But it’s so much more than that. The loop of gathering resources, upgrading your gear, exploring the planet, building a base, expanding the base, relocating the base because you found a better spot, rebuilding the base because you unlocked a bigger base compartment, moving the base again because a big tree spawned and it’s blocking your view of the lake, then moving it again simply because you want to move it again - it has me.
I usually end up the base builder while my husband takes care of logistics. I enjoy exploring and, let’s be honest, getting lost because not only is it a biiiig planet and my navigational skills are what they are, chances are also that the area looks completely different when I circle back twenty minutes later. That’s enough to throw anyone off, right? Right?
There’s no combat, so despite there being a constant pressure not to run out of food, water or air (or not to drop to your death because you forgot to equip your jetpack) it’s quite a chill, cosy game. Easily to lose yourself in it for a while until you realise that your hunger meter irl is in the red, too.
The Toxicity DLC just came out and it adds yet another refreshing new planet with a new challenging mechanic that changes your playstyle entirely. It’s not the first time these devs pull that off, the Humble DLC effectively did the same thing: introducing a new planet to explore with new mechanics, overhauling the base game you know and love into something familiar yet new and challenging.
ASKA
ASKA is a survival colony sim, which immediately puts it right up my alley.
Gather resources, make tools, build shelter, find food, summon villagers using the blood of the fallen Jotun- oh, yeah, that’s a bit different, I guess.
This game is beautiful and gorgeous, and that makes it super fun to explore. So many times, I run through a forest only to come out on the other end and gasp at the view.
Combat with regular mobs can be challenging as they surprise you, but dying is not too punishing and as you grow your settlement, your villagers will help out defending it. Building fences and then later walls keeps out the pesky little produce stealing floofballs and the bitey wolves alike, and it definitely helps if you have a husband who’s better in combat than you are, too.
As always, I tend to end up the decorating / builder, which is fun in this game even though there aren’t that much purely decorative objects to put in the world. There’s something enticing about building for efficiency but prettily.
The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria
The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria speaks for itself. It’s DWARVES - and not just any dwarves but LotR dwarves at that - hitting things with pickaxes, mining resources, building bases, beating up goblins, voicing sassy one-liners and singing mining songs as they do it.
With only one goal in mind - returning to Moria - the game is easy to lose yourself in. It’s straight-forward in the sense that there’s a “mine here” marker and then your goal is to reach that spot and mine it, gathering resources, upgrading gear and defeating enemies on your way there.
As a survival game, it is not the best or most challenging, but the atmosphere really makes up for it. The game is gorgeous and the Lord of the Rings references seal the deal.
PowerWash Simulator 2
The original PowerWash Simulator was one of those cleaning games that makes my brain go brr, and PowerWash Simulator 2 isn’t any different.
Hose goes pffshh, brain goes brrrr, can’t explain it.
The first game’s story was surprisingly good, and the second iteration in the series continues that trend. It’s the same game you know and love, with all the familiar tools but a few quality of life changes (soap got the overhaul it desperately needed) and some new things that make this game so much better than the first one.
For starters: you get an office! Reminiscent of what Viscera Cleanup Detail does with the home office, you get a space to decorate with furniture you unlock (and clean!) after doing the main quests. Every level gives you a little statue thingy for your office which is what I live and breathe for.
Going pffshh together makes the game more fun, as it’s one of those things you can semi-mindlessly do while chatting and relaxing together. With a little room for some good old trolling, of course.
Enshrouded
It’s been a while since we last played Enshrouded, but it needs to be on this list regardless.
If you were to ask me which game has the best building mechanic, my answer would be this, and it isn’t even close. It’s fun to play alone, it’s fun to play together, and it’s fun even in bigger groups.
The loop is the same as always: gather resources, craft gear, build a base, upgrade gear, defeat enemies. Save NPCs that then move into your settlement as vendors. But most importantly: manage the shroud.
A sort of misty shadow covers the world and all kinds of nasties spawn inside of it. Your job is to explore it without dying, kill the enemies, clear the shroud to the best of your ability and survive.
But you can ignore all that in favour of just building. You can manipulate every literal voxel in Enshrouded. That means mining away a teeny tiny little cube from the wall and replacing with another teeny tiny little cube from another material, mixing and matching and combining to your heart’s content.
Do you hear what I’m saying? Building on a voxel level! Imagine for example taking over a nicely hand-crafted yet abandoned, broken down tavern and then being able to upgrade it as you go, filling in the broken parts, decorating with all kinds of gorgeous and sometimes functional items, and then deciding, “oh, I’m going to tear off the roof and add an attic”, which you can do using bigger building blocks, and then being able to masterfully craft and decorate on a voxel level.
Just the building alone could keep me busy for hours, I’d almost forget I’m playing with someone else. Ahem.
