Tag Archives: Cooperative

Mazes, Mulligans, and Monsters

My little co-op group occasionally takes breaks from the open world survival crafting games we normally focus on to play other things. Sometimes this is due to finishing one game and not having the time to properly dive into the next one that session, and sometimes it’s as more of an palate cleanser. As with Cleaning, Climbing, and Crime, I’ve got 3 more such games that we played relatively recently to cover.

MIMESIS is another “friend slop” game looking to capitalize on becoming a flavor of the week hit. While I don’t know how successful they were, the game is definitely interesting. At the risk of being offensively reductive, I’d describe it of combing the simple controls and pleasantly stylized graphics of something like the previously discussed Peak (but let’s be honest, thousands of other games too) with the basic gameplay conceit of an older and briefly very popular friend slop classic we haven’t discussed here before, Lethal Company. In a sentence, you and your group are sent into a creepy abandoned facility to scavenge while being harassed by whatever supernatural or at least paranormal entities lurk in the dark.

“Get used to this view.”

What sets MIMESIS apart is the clever way these “entities” are implemented. There’s something similar to Left 4 Dead’s AI Director going on, attempting to adapt to player behavior to for a varied and dynamic feeling experience regarding when, how, and what new entities and other events are deployed. In MIMESIS’s case, this also almost always includes a (usually gradual) escalation from the scares coming exclusively from the tension of being in a dark, maze-like environment and knowing that shit is eventually going to pop off, to utter chaos as you and your teammates end up getting split up, being chased by all kinds of terrible shit, and not knowing who is friend or foe.

That last part is key here, as there’s also a system in which some of these entities assume the identities of players, alive or dead, including attempting to mimic their behaviors and even repeating voice lines they said (which means for the best experience you should definitely be using the in-game voice chat.) In our age of LLM based AI this could get pretty sophisticated, though I don’t think what MIMESIS is doing is really is all that technically interesting. Instead, it often felt like dumb luck when just the perfect voice line was repeated at just the right time. In any case, it is highly effective in making people paranoid and thoroughly creeped out, and when things did get chaotic, it was some of the funnest, most hilarious moments I’ve had online in quite a while. Surprisingly, some of my favorite moments were after being killed and spectating on the remaining players à la something like Counter-Strike, only it’s much more entertaining to watch your remaining teammates frantically run around bumping into one obstacle after another, especially when that leads to interacting with your doppelganger(s) without a clue that you’re actually dead.

“Spectating another player as escape to outside.”

Naturally, there is a little hub area where you and your group can return to deposit your loot in between runs, buy some equipment and make other upgrades that persist to some degree, but this is an aspect of the game I can’t really speak to as after just a handful of runs across a couple of sessions, we all felt like we’d experienced what the game was about, had some fun, and were ready to move on. While I could see some groups sticking it out for much longer, it takes just the right game for our group to commit to something longer term.

Speaking of which, the next game is another “friend slop” game, and one we played for even less time. Super Battle Golf, as its name might suggest, is perhaps hard to even call a cooperative game. That is, it’s essentially a basic cooperative golf game, except all players go at the same time instead of taking turns, and you’re essentially racing against each other to see who can complete the hole first. As if that wasn’t chaotic enough, there are all kinds of funky items including Mario Kart like power ups you can find scattered around to make things that much more insane. There’s nothing like lining up the perfect shot to be suddenly run down by a golf cart, or similarly disrupting someone else by nailing them with a homing missile just as they’re about to take their swing.

“The exact moment a rocket slams into a couple of golf carts. FORE!”

Super Battle Golf was definitely fun to screw around in, but had even less of a hook to keep us playing long term than games like MIMESIS or Peak, so screwing around for about 2 hours or so was all our time with the game amounted to. Still, it’s one I could see randomly going back to when we need to kill an hour or two. In fact, we choose this one due to having a fifth person join us that night and not wanting to toss them into the middle of a longer or more complex game. Objective achieved!

And now for something completely different, For the King II. One of our group had played through the first For the King game with a different group of friends and was itching to try the sequel. I thought it looked pretty neat, and it was definitely a different type of game than our usual survival games OR the kind of quick friend slop experiences we just covered. Instead, to me, it feels very much like it is based on some of the popular cooperative board games which had been making waves in the last 10 or so years. In particular, having only really played a little bit of the Jaws of the Lion version, it reminds me quite a lot of Gloomhaven, though there have been tons of vaguely similar fantasy RPG inspired board games over the years, such as the venerable Dungeon! and classics like HeroQuest.

“The world map as we kick off a new adventure.”

To describe that in a little more detail, the gameplay is something like this: Each player picks a character/class archetype and some starting traits and equipment and then get thrown onto a hex based world map where they take turns moving to trigger fights, visit towns, and investigate events and other points of interest. At the same time, each adventure (essentially a mini-campaign based on a single world map) has its own story with its own victory conditions, and because of the magic of video games, this can feel reasonably dynamic, with NPC dialogs and plot events triggering, etc. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention that in something of a rogue-lite twist, your characters do not persist between campaigns, but you’ll unlock new traits and equipment, points of interest, and even new classes which you can use in your next campaign.

As an aside, the class system is pretty interesting, as it mostly only dictates a few special abilities and your starting stats. The rest of your abilities are determined by the traits you pick during creation, and the weapons and other equipment you equip along the way. This means while it might be optimal to have a high intelligence, magic aligned character use a magic wand or staff, you can kind of do whatever you want.

“Strikingly familiar turn based tactical combat.”

The combat in For the King II resembles that more of a traditional turn-based JRPG in which your group and the enemies you’re fighting are placed on a grid and cycle throw and initiative based sequence. Like those JRPGs, it can feel a little tactical, with positioning and choosing when is the best time to deploy what attacks, abilities, and items, being a big part of the equation. There are also dice rolls governing a lot of the aspects of this, though they’re not presented as obviously as some games. In fact, in many ways I was surprised how little For the King II actually leans into its obvious board game inspiration; it almost seems like its trying to hide it.

Most of these fights take place on the world map and need to be purposely triggered unlike the infamous random encounter trope most often associated with JRPGs, though there are also scenarios in which you might need to defeat multiple waves of enemies. There are also dungeons, which are similar but much longer and involve moving from room to room. Most of these rooms are fights, though there are sometimes other events, choices on which path to take, and opportunities to heal and rest between rooms.

“The stats screen that comes with the successful completion of an adventure.”

I didn’t mention the aesthetics of the game yet, and I really should. The first For the King had a “mid-poly” style that looked quite nice. For the King II drops the mid-poly style and goes much harder into the cartoony style that was hinted at in the first game, while also further refining the overall look with some nice effects and polish. Overall, while relatively simple and certainly stylized, I think it looks quite nice.

There was a little frustration from my group around For the King II, but once we understood the gameplay mechanics a bit more (another thing it borrows from board game adaptations is its fairly unintuitive gameplay systems and atypical UI choices) and had experimented a little with different characters/classes, we started to have a lot more fun. If I recall correctly, we failed the first adventure twice, and then sailed through it and two or three more of them, clocking in something like 30 hours of game time. Personally, I had a lot of fun with the game and wouldn’t mind coming back to it, even if just by myself, though I think as a group, repetition had started to set in and we were ready to move on to something different.

Interestingly, the next game we tried ended up being similar in a lot of ways, but we’re still playing that one, so more on that later!

Writer’s Blocks

Like a lot of people my age, Tetris was first introduced to me via the venerable Game Boy version that so many of us got as a pack-in at the time, although certainly plenty of people fell in love with ports on other systems as well. Indeed, Tetris is one of those games that has been ported absolutely everywhere. Attempts to make sequels and spin-offs never managed to enter the zeitgeist in the way these late 80s – early 90s versions did, even if a great many of them were positively received. That hasn’t stopped attempts to keep remaking and iterating on the game, and some of the more recent releases were actually pretty successful. The original VR-oriented Tetris Effect and Tetris 99 both come to mind.

“Just one of the many themes in Tetris Effect: Connected.”

Tetris Effect: Connected is a version of that PlayStation VR version ported to other consoles and given some additional online features. It’s one of two games I picked up on Game Pass at around the same time, played a bunch, and then put down for a while before noticing they dropped off of Game Pass before I could finish them. Doh! Still, Tetris Effect was the one that was easy enough to keep picking up, playing a bit, and putting back down again no matter how long had passed since the last time, and that’s exactly how I played it. I did eventually beat the “Journey Mode” campaign on Normal difficulty after abandoning my initial goal to get at least a B rating on every level. The verdict? I loved it.

Tetris Effect combines classic Tetris gameplay with some trippy visualization and a dynamic, rhythmic soundtrack to create an amazing audio visual experience and, moreover, a really cool vibe. I’m sure it is an absolute blast in VR but even without a VR headset, it’s still fantastic. Gameplay-wise, it’s a fine version of the Tetris experience we all know and love. While there are some tweaks, notably the “Hold” queue, which lets you swap out the falling piece for the one in your holding area on-demand, and the “In The Zone” feature that, after building up, lets you hit something of a panic button to pause gravity temporarily, alleviating the death rain of tetrominoes and hopefully allowing you to maneuver yourself out of trouble, its mostly just good ol’ Tetris. I somehow missed the existence of both of these features and never purposely used them a single time during my entire playthrough, by the way, so it really was just classic Tetris for me. Maybe now that I know about those features I can go back an improve my scores, eh? 😅

“Dolphin attack!”

Between the classic gameplay and the awesome presentation, it’s just a great game to lose yourself in, and in that way, it’s quite relaxing, at least up into the point where it suddenly becomes a desperate panic, which is no doubt part of the core Tetris experience. Overall, the main thing Tetris Effect proves to me is that Tetris itself is literally a timeless classic; it’s just a great game at its core. To that end, I’m really curious about the recent Tetris Forever, which is something of a combination of a historical archive, including a documentary and a tour through many of those classic versions of the game. Once I can get it at a generous discount, you’ll probably see it here.

As an aside, while this is much less well known than its Tetris counterpart, another beloved puzzle classic, Lumines, actually got the similar Tetric Effect treatment from the same team in 2025 with Lumines Arise. Nice!

“Mio and Zoe, combining their powers… or something.”

Shifting gears completely, after enjoying A Way Out and loving It Takes Two, Hazelight’s similarly co-op focused Split Fiction ended up on my wishlist the second I got a good look at it. While we didn’t dive into it right away, my girlfriend and I eventually played through the game via couch co-op on our Xbox Series X. Unfortunately, it took us a few months of random sessions instead of being hooked enough to push through the game in a week or two as you might expect. Let me take a step back a bit first…

Split Fiction has each player playing one of the two protagonists of the story, Mio and Zoe. Mio and Zoe are both writers looking for their big break who, along with others, get invited to a big publishing company to pen deals to sell some stories, but are instead invited to participate in a new experimental virtual reality program which will apparently let them experience a sort of immersive virtual reality simulation of their own stories. Things don’t quite go as planned, and Mio ends up in Zoe’s simulation with her. Stuck in this corrupted virtual world built from the minds of both authors, the two must journey together through their stories and try to find a way to escape.

“One of the more WTF?! inducing side-stories.”

Honestly, the game’s first impressions weren’t that great, as I found the character models and scenery in the introduction where Mio and Zoe first visit Rader Publishing in the “real world” to look just a little too generic, almost bordering on the uncanny valley. Thankfully, once the game starts in earnest, it’s actually quite nice looking, and at times absolutely beautiful. Given the setup of the game, if they somehow dropped the ball on realizing these sci-fi and fantasy inspired worlds, it would have been hard to get passed. Sound design is also great, and I have no complaints with Mio and Zoe’s voice actors, which is good, because they talk a lot.

It’s hard not to compare Split Fiction with It Takes Two, and the biggest difference between the two besides the obvious plot differences, is in their gameplay. While It Takes Two felt inspired by the type of early 3D platformers that were all over the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation with their semi-open, more exploration based gameplay, Split Fiction feels more inspired by 2D platformers in that it has much tighter controls, much more action, much more linear level design, and is much more challenging overall. I wouldn’t say Split Fiction is necessary a “hard” game, but it definitely felt like there was a lot more friction than we felt in It Takes Two. I think we collectively died far more times than in It Takes Two, though I could be wrong and I just don’t remember dying often in It Takes Two because it was just so much more forgiving. In either case, at the end of the day Split Fiction felt a bit more intense and at times aggravating, and as a consequence, a little less fun than It Takes Two.

“2D platforming, mirrored!”

It’s hard to quantify and that is no doubt entirely subjective, because despite this, the game is still absolutely brilliant. As with It Takes Two, there’s a huge variety in gameplay, level design, and themes and almost all of it is competently executed. Split Fiction tends to mix up the gameplay mechanics per level rather than in sub-sections, and even the mini-games found throughout It Takes Two were replaced with “Side Stories” which are themselves differently themed smaller levels. While there’s nothing wrong with that, in fact, I’d argue that most of these side stories were more interesting than the mini-games found in It Takes Two, it does contribute to that more linear feeling. I also think the style of cooperative gameplay is a little different, with Split Fiction focusing more on scenarios where each character has different abilities which they use in parallel, and sometimes in together, rather than being forced to work together through mechanics that require being used in combination as was often the case with It Takes Two.

Like the game, I want to end on a more positive note, and while I don’t want to spoil anything, Split Fiction really ups the ante with its last level, which twists the concept of split screen co-op in some really creative, often mindbending ways. Saving these antics for the last level kept them from overstaying their welcome and felt like a great send off.

“Q: Are you in my world, or am I in yours? A: Yes!”

Overall, while I’d highly recommend Split Fiction for those looking for a solid two player co-op experience, I’d recommend It Takes Two first. While I’m sure some people will prefer Split Fiction, it seems that the popular consensus is with me on this one.

You know, I really should play Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons one of these days to complete my tour of Josef Fares’s work… 🤔

Surviving Survival Part 4

I don’t recall how it ended up on our list, but the next game my little weekly co-op group dove into was Atlas. Atlas is closely related to Ark: Survival Evolved in numerous ways, from its studio being founded by Ark’s founders, to some shared tech and gameplay systems. Instead of dinosaurs, Atlas is pirate themed. Pirates! While I haven’t played a ton of pirate theme games, I’m certainly not immune to the allure of the idea. Sid Meier’s Pirates is a bonafide classic, I got sucked into the idea of (and quickly bounced off of) Pirates of the Burning Sea way back in the day, and I’ve almost caved and jumped into Sea of Thieves numerous times now, for example. Glossing over user reviews, there was actually very little negative criticism about the game itself, instead the harsher reviews usually focused on the controversial way the game had been abandoned. That really didn’t affect us as we were going to host our own server and treat it like any of the other cooperative survival games we’d been playing.

“Easter Island, eat your heart out!”

Except, it was pretty evident from our first few hours in the game that this was actually much more of an MMORPG-like experience than I realized. While the character creator was pretty neat, we were then dumped on a small island where we each had to do a bunch of tedious tutorial quests related to gathering x of y, running between NPCs, and killing groups of mobs; you know the drill. While progress seemed quite slow, it’s well documented that I’m a sucker for MMORPGs and the fact that we somehow accidentally got our co-op group into one was pretty exciting for what that could mean for future games if we actually enjoyed it. Eventually we managed to wrap things up on the starter island, get our first ship, and head into the high seas. Yaaaarrrrr!

Figuring out how to sail our ship was kind of fun, and the mysteries of the open sea, from storms and sea creatures to shipwrecks and floating loot, and at one point being chased by an incredibly intimidating undead pirate ship, was all pretty exciting. The first few islands we stopped at were literal copies of the starter island, which was… weird. Getting a little further away, we finally stopped at a legitimately new island and started to explore. This led to more gathering and crafting and some new stuff to fight, but honestly wasn’t much different than what we saw on the tutorial island. We then raised anchor and, maneuvering around more scary looking enemy ships marked on the map, set down onto yet another island. Exploring was kind of fun, but again, more of the same with not much in the way of new materials to gather, animals to hunt, or enemies to fight.

“Braving a storm at sea in Atlas.”

After only about 9 hours in the game, 2 of my group had decided they’d seen enough. Our time with Atlas wasn’t horrible, by any means, but the repetitive grind, occasional sharp spikes in difficulty, slightly janky feel, and lack of much a unique identity or any other hook to keep us playing soured the experience just a bit too much. Interestingly, since then Windrose, which looks a lot more like the type of game I thought Atlas was going to be, has hit early access with a lot of buzz. Maybe I can convince the crew to get back together and go a-plundering at some point in the future?

Next on the list is The Planet Crafter. The Planet Crafter was another game I wasn’t really familiar with, and with its simple conceit and cartoony graphics, honestly didn’t really sound all that interesting to me. You’re some sort of engineer who arrives on a planet’s surface and needs to manage oxygen, food, and water to survive, harvesting and crafting to build better and better technology along the way. Sound familiar? *yawn* In fact, that description makes it sound almost identical to Icarus which I talked about in Surviving Survival Tres. Except, as entertaining as it can be to be stupidly reductive, The Planet Crafter actually turned out to be one of the best survival games we’ve played together.

“On the surface of Prime, not too long after landing.”

Upon closer examination, intriguing wrinkles in that simple conceit start to show. You’re not just some engineer, you’re actually a criminal who was sentenced to do this work. Interesting. What work? Terraforming the planet! Yep, unlike the aforementioned Icarus, the terraforming hasn’t already been completed – that’s your job, buddy! Not only that, but they didn’t send you down to the planet’s surface with no resources just because like the assholes in Icarus, but something went wrong and your decently equipped lander/habitat unit actually crashed, so your survival is at least somewhat out of necessity.

While all of this is pretty neat, where the game really shines is its systems. It manages to distill the basic “tree-puncher” formula down to the point where almost everything is done with a single mouse click. At first this feels kind of unintuitive, but soon you’ll be locked into the mindset and almost never have to wonder how to perform any action in the game. It’s fantastic! The whole terraforming thing is also a pretty interesting twist on your typical survival game. Much of the tech you’ll be building contributes to the pressure and heat you’re outputting, gradually transforming the barren planet to one with a blue sky and clouds, which leads to rain, which leads to the water level rising, which leads to moss and trees, which leads to insects, and then fish and eventually mammals. It’s super cool, and working towards that goal turns the game into feeling something more like a cross between Astroneer and Satisfactory. I rate both of those games highly, so this is no small praise.

“Many hours later, the world is looking much more hospitable.”

There’s also a focus on exploring more of the map to find new resources, as well as finding more and new tech by exploring shipwrecks, abandoned habitats from previous terraforming attempts, and long buried alien temples. There’s even something of a story to go along with all of that. This is somewhat similar to exploring in those two games, but much more of a necessity, and well balanced between being risky and being fun and rewarding.

Just like in Satisfactory and a lot of these kinds of survival games, I spent a lot of my time exploring. Unlike those games, so did the rest of the group. I think that speaks volumes.

“The crew and I about to enter an ancient temple.”

We completed terraforming the planet you start on (Prime) before taking off and heading over to the moon Selenea which started the cycle all over again, only with twists in what material was and wasn’t available from the get go, including some new things, and a limited ability to move items and resources between our original planet and the moon. While we didn’t finish terraforming it, the fact that we even played so much more of the game after “finishing” one playthrough says a lot about how much we enjoyed The Planet Crafter, and I could definitely see us coming back to it at some point in the future.

Next up was a game I’ve already mentioned in this series, Enshrouded. I’m happy to report that between a lot of patching since the last time we played it, adding more content and a lot of quality of life improvements, and playing with our full group this time, it finally hit more like I’d originally imagined it would.

“Soloing an apparently evenly matched mini-boss.”

One of the first things I noticed when jumping into the game this time was the graphical overhaul it received. I believe the models, textures, and animations are still mostly the same, but at some point it got a lighting rework which made the game look so much nicer. I think it might also run a little better to boot, but that could be my imagination.

There are so many more survivor NPCs to recruit to your base, making it feel much more lively, and necessitating a settlement approach to construction even more than before. Of course, most of these new NPCs bring new recipes to craft and new quests to complete. In fact, that relates to one of my few complaints about this playthrough – there are way too many quests, and they don’t chain together like in a well designed RPG, rather your quest log is just stuffed with random tasks to complete all over the map, and every time you cross one off it feels like 3 more pop up. I’m perhaps exaggerating a little, but it did feel kind of overwhelming and tempted us to simply not worry about them that much. That said, when things got slow and we started to feel a little bored, crossing one or two off of the list was an easy way to remedy that.

“Man, Enshrouded is full of incredible views!”

That was more of an issue later, but one thing that endangered our playthrough early on was the difficulty of the combat. I’ve previously described the game as more of an action-adventure game along the lines of a modern Legend of Zelda game, but its take on combat might be more inspired by the Dark Souls series and the like. Stamina management is important, as are blocking and rolling and dodging in and out of combat to avoid what otherwise can be fairly punishing attacks. Thankfully this is much more of an issue for the first few levels of the game, as between obtaining new and better gear and selecting new skills as you level up, combat gets considerably easier as you progress.

At this point the game is still in early access so I’m not sure it actually has anything resembling an “end” quite yet, though we did explore almost the entire map including maxing out our skill points and defeating what is, at least at the moment, its biggest and hardest boss, the Fell Dragon Youngling at the Howling Peak. This was easily the most poorly tuned and frustrating part of the entire game, and we hit our heads against that particular challenge for large portions of at least two different sessions, and probably would have quit over it if we weren’t hard-headedly determined to get beyond it, even if it wasn’t actually blocking any of our progress.

“On the other hand, finally slaying this fucking thing felt great.”

We finally quit the game when we felt like we’d more or less exhausted the more notable content, and between the three playthroughs I’ve done I have about 127 hours in game. My first two were probably in the single digits, so yeah, we definitely put our time in! While it was dicey at first, in the end I think Enshrouded has earned a spot amongst the best co-op survival games we’ve played thus far. It might not be my absolute favorite, as some more unique experiences edge it out, but it’s a great game, and I’ll be keeping an eye on it when it finally reaches 1.0 (projected to be quite soon) and beyond.

Finally, on a much less positive note, is Nightingale. This is another game that I’d heard nothing about but ended up on our radars somehow, and we all picked it up during a Steam sale. I was feeling a little down on the idea of jumping into yet another boiler plate tree-puncher, after all, we’ve played quite a few of them, often one after the other, but once we started playing the game and learning its systems, it was growing on me.

“Puck is always around to creepily advise you on your next steps.”

To back up for a second, Nightingale has kind of an interesting theme, mixing Victorian-eque gaslamp setting with fae mythology and magic, and more than a little interdimensional travel. It looks gorgeous much of the time, and its systems are fairly interesting, albeit it apparently pivoted from being an MMORPG to a more traditional open world survival game at some point in its development. I don’t know much about its history, but I get the distinct impression that, not unlike Atlas, some shit went down, and as a result, the game just didn’t quite hit as hoped. I don’t believe it’s been abandoned yet, but it definitely seems to have lost just about all of its early access momentum and hype, sadly enough.

So we jumped into the game and started trying to figure out what the hell we were doing. The fact that it took a little while to figure out some of the systems at hand was actually a positive, since it meant it wasn’t quite as cookie-cutter as I’d feared. We traveled all over the first realm completing quests and exploring points of interest before finally moving on to the next one. In the next one, we set up a new homestead to serve as our base of operations, and then spent quite a while gathering, crafting, and otherwise teching up before moving on to knocking out quests and otherwise clearing the map. Unfortunately, the latter task felt a lot like what we’d done in the previous realm, which gave me some concern about the gameplay getting too repetitive if we continued to play it so methodically.

“Exploring the mysterious realms of Nightingale.”

At some point we got a quest to try out a new ability to more freely travel from realm to realm by opening our own portals, which brought us to yet another new, though much smaller realm. This one was quite different, and the promise of all of these unique realms was starting to be evident. Once we cleared it and went back to continue where we left off on the second realm, however, we made a startling discovery: our homestead and everything we’d had stored in it was totally gone; the map was back to its original state. While we still had our character progress, losing all of this work, including some special quest rewards, took the wind right out of our sails. While we found reports of similar issues evidently caused by bugs from years back, it still isn’t clear to me if we could have somehow screwed something up in the way we traveled back to this realm, or if it was indeed some kind of bug. In any case, after fruitlessly looking for some solution to restore our progress, we collectively gave Nightingale the middle finger and moved on. Major bummer!