The best co-op games on PC

If you like video games, there's a good chance you'll like playing them with friends. And if you like playing them with friends, there's an even better chance you'll want to face pixellated challenges together for those shared moments of unadultered triumph: screaming "LET'S GOOO" down the mic and spraying spittle on your ancient Dell monitors. So, if you want to shoot monsters together or embrace a couple that's divorcing each other as they play tiny doll versions of themselves, then we've rounded up the very best co-op games below.

The key definition for co-op here is games you can play with a pal that doesn't involve fighting against each other. We've got competitive games over on our best multiplayer games page, so you best get looking over there.

And we've spruced up this very list with some key changes, which I won't list exhaustively. Just know that we've removed a few older entries, replaced a couple, and chucked some new ones in. Monster Hunter Wilds takes Monster Hunter Rise's place, while Dark Souls: Prepare To Die Edition gets swapped out for Elden Ring, for instance. The reasons are as follows: 1) newer innit; 2) They're home to greater co-op polish. We've also popped in some new entries that represent a real resurgence in co-op experiences centered around fun, like climb-slop Peak and Half-Life parody Abiotic Factory.

Top 10 Best PC Co-op Games Of All Time

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The best co-op games on PC

Here's our full list of the best co-op games on PC. You can have a casual scroll through or click the links below to be directed straight to the game in question.

• Regular Human Basketball
• Monster Hunter Wilds
• Lethal Company
• Escape Academy
• Overcooked 2
• Stardew Valley
• Rainbow Six Vegas 2
• Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes
• ARMA 3
• Dead by Daylight
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge
• Valheim
• Deep Rock Galactic
• Diablo 4
• Warhammer 40k: Darktide
• It Takes Two
• Elden Ring
• Spelunky 2
• Grand Theft Auto 5
• Minecraft
• Baldur's Gate 3
• Left 4 Dead 2
• Portal 2
• Helldivers 2
• Peak
• Abiotic Factory
• Satisfactory
• Grounded
• LEGO Marvel Super Heroes

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Regular Human Basketball

Nothing to see here, just some regular humans shooting hoops. Nope, no giant robots equipped with jetpacks, magnets and retractable legs playing basketball. I don't know what you're talking about.

In Matt Cox's Have You Played... Regular Human Basketball? piece, he said the game's "best when played in groups of four or more, where efficient communication and coordination are key to victory". And if you can manage that, you're in for a treat. It's just like normal basketball, except each team controls a mech by frantically running around inside it to reach the controls.

It's difficult enough when you're on your own, but coordinating with a teammate who has a VERY different idea about 'appropriate times to activate the jetpack' can be a nightmare. A hilarious nightmare, but a nightmare nonetheless.

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Monster Hunter Wilds

As is so often the case with Monster Hunter games, you aren't here for the story. You're here to hunt big lizards and birds with your pals, with the sole aim of turning their hides or feathers into silky outerwear. What's neat is a sense of comradery and routine: you sink a hearty meal, you check your inventory, you skip off into the deep dark woods where scary monsters live. The rituals make the co-op sing.

What sets Wilds apart from the extensive back catalogue is its new, wretched additions to the monster roster. Brendy describes the Nu Udra in his Monster Hunter Wilds review as a "drippy oil octopus", while the "fleshy-mouthed sandworm" called Balahara that turns dunes into quicksand that threatens to swallow you whole. Don't worry, we've got some Balahara tips that will see you come out on top.

The world is now seamless, so no more loading screens between lush rainforests and desert plains. And sure, there aren't any new weapons, but that just means you've more time to master the best Monster Hunter Wilds weapons - particularly when you reach the moreish endgame. For more than just Brendy's opinion, read our Monster Hunter Wilds RPS Verdict on Wilds as a co-op experience.

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Lethal Company

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Steam always has to have at least one co-op ghosty game in early access, over which people are going bananas. While Lethal Company may have had its time in the sun it has held onto its spot on this list. It's a bit of a horror game, as you form up in teams for some good old PVE. As contractors for the Company, you collect scrap (kettles, plastic fish, other assorted goods) from abandoned haunted moons that used to be industrial centres. Successfully salvaging enough scrap earns you cash, which you can use to jet off to new moons with more rewards. The trade off, of course, is higher risk.

There are mundane risks like traps, which one player can spot from the ship scanner and call out to those on the mission. But there are, of course, horrid goolies to contend with, especially as night closes in. Some you'll only find indoors, while others stalk you on open ground. It's a great mix of learning a bestiary and knowing what to do in different situations, with having a concrete goal (get plastic fish), and there are many and varied ways to die, so you learn quickly. Read more via Alice Bell's wonderfully titled, "I respect Lethal Company's dedication to being a slapstick-fest that makes zero sense whatsoever".

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Escape Academy

Escape rooms in real life are a lot of fun but extremely expensive for it. Escape Academy combines the twin benefits of being comparatively cheap and being designed by developers who made escape rooms in real life! It's a great co-op game, whether you're playing online or via asymmetrical couch co-op (i.e. one of you playing the game and the other writing things down and shouting). Ed Thorn graduated from the academy alongside his great pal James and reckoned companies should replace "team-bonding sessions with a puzzle-tower" in his Escape Academy review.

The titular academy is a school where the entire curriculum is based around room escapes. Even art, which seems like a stretch. Each level is a timed escape, often in somewhat dangerous circumstances that you'd imagine would drive the school's insurance premiums up, with secret codes, cryptic clues, and much frantic running around a library or a locked office as you collect special books, or put post-it notes in the right order. It's the right balance of fun and tense, and gets you all reacting exactly as you would if thrown into the Crystal Maze, fruitlessly telling each other you've found a paint tin, is that anything? The big, colourful 3D world is non-violent but successfully thrilling, and there are a bunch of DLCs to get stuck into, too.

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Overcooked 2

Overcooked and its sequel Overcooked 2 are both are silly games of simmering and sizzling, the physical manifestation of the phrase "too many cooks spoil the broth". You're in a kitchen with up to three other players, and you have to make food to order by preparing and combining certain ingredients. To get this done properly, everyone needs to carry out their appointed tasks pronto. Thing is, it doesn't always work out that way.

The kitchens of Overcooked are constantly changing. Narrow spaces mean players get in each other's way. Sometimes the whole level shifts. Benches on a ship will slide down the deck with each large wave, altering the layout entirely, while cooking in two trucks means that one part of the kitchen will occasionally accelerate, suddenly becoming off-limits. How will you get the chow off the hob before it boils into an inedible paste? By shouting at your fellow chefs, of course.

Overcooked 1 and 2 are much the same, but it's 2 we'd recommend. For one, it's home to online multiplayer as well as local, letting you play with those geographically distant friends. For two, you can throw ingredients back and forth between chefs. Your co-chef needs more mushrooms? Maybe he'll catch the one you just threw to him; maybe it'll bonk him right in the face. Jay Castello reckons it's "one of the most fun and moreish co-op games" she's played in her Overcooked 2 review.

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Stardew Valley

There is a lot of shooting and adventuring on this list, but very few opportunities to hang out in a turnip field. Stardew Valley lets you live out an alternate life as a farmer, away from the hustle and bustle of cities and video games with guns. It's about escaping with your pals, and as Steven Messner put in his early Stardew Valley review, the game is a "rare kind of imitation that breaks free of the boundaries of its inspiration". That inspiration being Harvest Moon, of course.

Stardew Valley provides a comforting universe to exist in rather than a challenge to overcome. Each of you gets to dodder around town, either working together and divvying up tasks or ploughing away at individual farms. It's not that the Valley feels sterile without other humans, but there are only so many blackberries you can hand over to your NPC neighbours before your relationships start feeling one dimensional. With real people in the mix, you get an actual community. Maybe your pal has a spare melon you can give to Penny for her birthday. Maybe they'll bake you a cake. Or steal your chickens.

People breathe warmth and life into this, making it one of the best farming games on pc. You've got the freedom to pursue whatever charming humdrum activity takes your fancy. Go fishing. Comb the beach. Or, if you want, mercilessly compete to see who can optimise profits. It's your farm.

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Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas 2

You can play through the whole of Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas 2's brilliant but flawed campaign with a friend, rappelling down walls, breaching windows and taking out terrorists in unison. While that will keep you busy a while, it's Terrorist Hunt - a mode where you team up with three buddies to hunt down a set amount of enemies across large sandbox maps - that will keep you coming back.

Guns are powerful and fast; death comes faster. This makes methodically creeping through the maps as a unit, covering corners and assaulting defended positions, an incredibly tense affair. This only ramps up when your squad inevitably gets picked apart on the harder difficulties, right up until three of you are sat watching the lone survivor, the whole success of the mission pinned on them scraping through. It could even be down to you and you'll feel the tension ramp up as you suddenly become aware of being judged.

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Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes

The best example of asymmetry in co-op. It involves at least two players - one of you is defusing a bomb with judicious mouse clicks and cautious wire snips, the other is giving instructions from a bomb-defusing manual. Neither player can look at what the other is doing. It's one of the most perfect set-ups for the destruction of a healthy relationship and a fantastic example of leaving the screen itself behind. Read Brendy's Have You Played... Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes? piece for a snapshot of why it's so darn good.

You don't have to print out the manual to read from it (you could just read the PDF file from a laptop) but we think it's the best way to play. You flip hurriedly through pages, trying to decipher the theory of these explosive devices. Then comes the challenge of communicating the quirks and symbols of the page in a way that won't be misunderstood. As the bomb handler, you're consistently double-checking and second-guessing your team mate as they stammer out their directions. In the end, you've just got to trust them.

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Arma 3

Arma 3 takes place on a pair beautiful fictional Greek islands. It does have a single-player campaign, but it's that island, the vehicles, guns and mechanics, and the painstaking attention to detail, that makes Arma 3 great. It's a platform for the community to create their own games upon, and there's enough community made content that if you get into it, you could be playing Arma 3's cooperative mode to the exclusion of any other game. Rick Lane sings its praises in his Have You Played... Arma 3? piece, calling it "hugely diverse".

There's something about Arma's design philosophy that makes it especially well suited to playing with other people. Partly there's the realism, which obviously lends itself well to the kinds of genuine squad tactics you can enact when playing with some dedicated friends or a committed community like ShackTac. Partly it's the way in which the islands are designed in spite of you, not in service to you, making your steady journeys across the landscape with another person feel more satisfying than overcoming a set of contrived obstacles. Hopefully one of you is a good pilot.

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Dead by Daylight

This is one for folks who love playing as the monster. Dead By Daylight is an asymmetrical survival horror sim not for the squeamish. In this 4-vs-1 co-op, three players take on the role of survivors and one player the killer, in a cat-and-mouse style multiplayer game with simple goals. Survivors must repair five out of seven generators scattered throughout a level to power the exit and escape. The killer, meanwhile, is hunting them, and can strike survivors with a weapon, and then drag them to a hanging hook and impale them on it. Ew.

Skills and abilities are balanced between the survivors and the killer; the killer, for example, is faster than the survivors in general, but is slower at specific tasks, like having to destroy obstacles instead of vaulting over them. With a spookily long list of Killers to play as (including horror film and game favourites like Ghost Face, Pyramid Head, and Michael Myers) there’s plenty of spooky fun to be found with this one. Hey, Adam Smith called it a "cooperative masterclass" with other words like "genius" also featuring throughout. Now that's pretty high praise.

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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge

Here’s a good ol’ fashioned beat-em-up, courtesy of Tribute Games. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge is an old-school side-scroller that pays homage to the TMNT games of bygones past. If you're a fan of the sewer-dwelling reptiles then you'll love the pixelart renditions of favourite characters from the series, both heroes and villains alike.

This entry is a little different from others on our co-op list, in that its co-op playstyle is much more laid-back than many others of its stress-inducing co-op cohort. Hayden illustrates this in their Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge review, calling it a "simple scroller that's best with buddies". What’s great about Shredder’s Revenge that its undemanding basic button-mashing becomes one of its biggest strengths, making it perfect for groups of friends who just want an arcadey jaunt while also having a nice chinwag surrounded by empty pizza boxes.

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Valheim

Valhiem’s Steam page describes it as “brutal” but I actually think this is one of the most relaxing co-op games on this list. There’s something for everyone here. If you’d like to focus on laid-back Viking settlement building and boar hunting in a peaceful environment you can hang out in the sandbox’s first area and do exactly that; if you and your friends are looking for some proper Viking action, you can head off into the world and get your butt beaten by skeletons, grey dwarfs, trolls, and its beastly Norse-themed bosses.

For a whistlestop tour of how Valheim can transform you and your pals into polygonal oafs we'd recommend starting with Ed Thorn's dream to make the bees happy. Then move onto the carrot saga. Read about his mining exploits. Give his half-naked sail a gander. Finish with his boar romance.

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Deep Rock Galactic

It's a simple pitch: a group of dwarven friends with class-based skills walk into an asteroid, mine for materials, and fight back the critters who fancy them for dinner. What complicates matters is the need to leave again: once their pockets are full, the dwarves have got five minutes to down pickaxes and reach an escape pod before it leaves without them. When the game launched out of Steam Early Access, Nic Reuben said it had "tons of detail, tons of character, and tons of riotous bug blasting" in his Deep Rock Galactic review. Totally unrelated, but sort of related: James used it to identify the mushrooms in his plant pot. Kinda.

This is even more complicated than it seems, because the asteroid's tunnels and caverns are a twisting warren interspersed with enormous drops. Retrace your path inwards in reverse, in a rush, and it's easy to get lost - and those drops are now, of course, climbs. If you thought to make your ad hoc constructions two-way when you threw them up on the way in, then no problem. If you were hasty, or if your platforms were destroyed by explosive enemies, then you're going to need to construct a new route. The adrenaline rush of your extraction is a thrill with friends over voice comms all panicking together.

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Diablo 4

Like Diablos before it (notably Diablo 3), Diablo 4 is a muddy, grim fantasy world beset by demons, which means it's sensible to take a friend or two. And, again like previous Diablo games, it's playable with a squad of four from start fo finish, with drop in multiplayer that tracks progress you made so you can go back to it in single-player if you want. But why would you bother! Exploding skeletons and werewolf monsters is a breeze in Diablo 4, requiring a lot of clicking and spamming your favourite spells, but little else, as Alice Bell goes into in her Diablo 4 review. This means you have a lot of time to bond with your friends.

That's maybe reductive; one of the best things about Diablo 4 is that it has an admirably freeing levelling system for all the classes, so you can respec on the fly to suit whoever you're playing with. And if a particular boss is giving you trouble, you can change tactics. Get your Rogue a spell to go invisible so you can more easily res your colleagues, while you can change your Necromancer's spell path to have more debuffing spells, giving your Barbarian attacks more bite, and you're on your way to victory.

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Warhammer 40k: Darktide

The RPS Hivemind came together in their Warhammer 40K: Darktide review and called it "brilliantly grisly co-op" when it first launched. Ed enjoyed "wildly slashing packs of feral bog-men", which is largely what you'll be doing, as this breed of Warhams has a similar feel to Left 4 Dead. But back then, the Hivemind weren't too hot on the missions or the skill trees or any of the longterm motivations that might keep you actually coming back to beatdown the bog-men.

But over the years it's garnered a few updates that address these issues. Regular DLC drops have added new classes like the dual-wielding Hive Scum and patches like the Nightmare and Visions update introduced a wave-based game mode, which then got expanded a bit later down the line. Essentially, it's getting gorier in cleverer ways and that makes it a grand co-op proposition for you bloodthirsty bastards reading this.

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It Takes Two

Hazelight have a knack for designing clever, co-op-only puzzle games, and It Takes Two marked a breakthrough in terms of scope and polish. Alice Bell called it a "really fun way to tell a bit of a boring story" in her It Takes Two review, which basically sums up what you get up to.

You and a mate play as bickering couple May and Cody, who get turned into tiny doll versions of themselves after upsetting their daughter. Despite their relationship being the verge of a big divorce bust-up, they must work together to get back to their normal selves, and maybe learn a few life lessons along the way.

It's not the happiest of stories, all told (and features some truly horrifying moments involving stuffed toys and broken vacuum cleaners), but its puzzles are absolutely top notch. Players must really work together to conquer It Takes Two's imaginative obstacle courses, and its range of ideas is a clear step up from Hazelight's first co-op-only game, A Way Out. Even better, only one person needs to actually buy the game, as every copy comes with a free friend pass for your player two.

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Elden Ring

According to Ed Thorn's Elden Ring review, it offered "the most impressive open world to date". And according to his Shadow Of The Erdtree DLC review, it basically tacked on an intricate equivalent of a sequel. High praise, certainly. Yet it's for a Souls game that's hard-as-nails but more accessible than ever, offering summons and Graces (bonfires) and ways to level that make the experience less like butting your head against a wall and more like doing so initially, then finding a way to smash that wall down once you've popped down the shops to buy a sledgehammer off an undead ogre.

The sledgehammer isn't necessarily a weapon either. It could be a mate you've called in with a Furled Finger, who you can largely tackle many of the game's trickiest encounters and open world capers alongside. It might not provide seamless drop-in-drop-out stuff, but it works well enough to take the edge off Elden Ring's aggressive world filled with gigantic lobsters who really, really hate to see you thrive.

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Spelunky 2

Spelunky helped popularise roguelikes in the 2000s, bringing permadeath, level randomisation and systemic hijinks to the masses via the familiar language of a 2D platformer. Spelunky 2 arrived much later, in 2020, to effectively complicate the formula with new biomes, enemies, items and secrets to be uncovered. The result, for players of the original, is that one of the greatest games ever made feels fresh again, and for newcomers, one of the greatest games ever made is more accessible.

Much like the original, Spelunky 2 is a great co-op game, too. Taking all the tough-but-fair rules of the base game and adding a second, third or fourth player to the mix simply multiplies the chaos, turning levels into Rube Goldberg devices where the conclusion is you exploding, falling into lava, or being killed by a rock. The slapstick physics make these mishaps funny rather than frustrating, as does a pretty generous system of respawns should one player remain alive. If you've struggled with Spelunky in singleplayer, give co-op a go and you might find it all finally clicks for you. Graham called it a "worthy successor to a classic" in his Spelunky 2 review, so you know it's got the sauce (sauce meaning good... it's good).

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Grand Theft Auto V

Los Santos is a gorgeous playground, each bend in the road bringing you level with a postcard view - every angle feels scrutinised. Trace a route from the peak of Mt. Chiliad, driving down through the dusty plains of the Grand Senora Desert, snaking by the hilltop mansions of Vinewood Hills, cruising on through the twinkling city itself and finally coming to stop at Vespucci Beach - all this, including the skies above and the sea beyond, is your online playground. Alice O found Los Santos a particularly nice cycle experience, too.

Grand Theft Auto Online is stuffed full of co-op scenarios, but the best experiences are found in the Heists. These multi-part missions ask you and three other players to take part in everything from the setup - casing the joint and grabbing getaway vehicles - all the way to the caper itself. While not all of them are literal heists, each one does an incredible job of making sure all four players are busy. Everyone has their own job to do, sometimes all together, sometimes in pairs and sometimes alone. This, along with the randomness of the open-world's systems, gives each one massive replay value. The only real downside is that you really need to play with three friends to get the most out of it. With each heist taking a couple of hours from setup to execution, it can be as difficult to organise as an actual heist.

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Minecraft

Nobody knew how huge Minecraft would be when the alpha released in 2010, but there were hints of it even from the first few hours, when the game's initial players started building rudimentary shapes and sharing screenshots of what they'd created.

Today, Minecraft is played by people of all ages. Part of its appeal, aside from its openness, is the social aspect. Whether helping your child stave off monsters as you build a fantasy land together, playing it as a walking sim, or collaborating with a group of adults to make a working hard drive, there's something for everyone.

You can even play it as an RPG, killing mobs with your co-op partner, levelling up and building equipment to grow stronger, with the eventual goal of taking on the final boss, the Ender Dragon. Minecraft is whatever you want it to be and you can play it all with friends.

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Baldur's Gate 3

Baldur's Gate 3 is based on the Dungeons & Dragons world and ruleset, and that's a party-based tabletop roleplaying game - so why wouldn't you want to make it a party in its digi-form? The campaign tells the tale of a rag-tag bag of heroes saving a lush fantasy world, getting into scrapes, meeting weird NPCs, and engaging in huge turn-based battles against monsters and ghouls. Much of this, like Larian's Divinity games, is based on using the different skillsets and abilities of your characters effectively, and that's much easier to do when the different characters are specced and controlled by other people, rather than you juggling it all yourself.

Unlike other co-op games, Baldur's Gate's co-op is tied to a single save and campaign. No fairweather dropping in and out! But this makes it feel like more of a collegiate story that you're telling together, like an adventure you're having as a group. Like, in fact, a game of Dungeons & Dragons. Like, in fact, "the best Dungeons & Dragons game anyone has made, and probably ever will make" according to Alice Bell in her Baldur's Gate 3 review.

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Left 4 Dead 2

Panicking with friends can be sublime. That shared fear and desperation, the yells and shrieks of people facing the same horde, each convinced they're moments from being overwhelmed. In a sense, they already are.

Horror games reach into your lizard brain and convince your amygdala that you're in trouble. Left 4 Dead 2 is one of the best, because it's built around saving your friends from that state. When the necrotic tongue of a Smoker comes grasping for your mate, you get to save the day with a well placed shot. When a Hunter pounces on your pal who's straggling at the back, there you are with a punch and shotgun blast. When a Tank jumps right into the middle of your group... well, you can't survive every time.

That's part of what makes triumph taste so sweet. You're pulling together against an AI director that keeps you on your toes, sending in hordes when it thinks you can take them, but rarely throwing so much at you that it feels unfair. Every level is an appropriately intense ordeal, where cries of frustration can quickly turn into tears of laughter. Many years on, Valve could still be considered the kings of co-op horror. Especially if you play Versus mode, and know the Hunter tearing into you is your mate Dave. Read more in John Walker's Left 4 Dead 2 review.

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Portal 2

What happens when you take a single-player game about traversing intricate puzzle rooms with portals, and then double everything? It becomes twice as complicated and twice as satisfying. Portal 2 already expands on everything introduced in the bite-sized Portal, adding things like Excursion Funnels, Thermal Discouragement Beams, Propulsion Gel and other fancy sounding words, but the addition of another player changes things the most.

Four portals make each room more confusing to explore, especially when you consider both players need to reach the exit. In essence, many rooms require two solutions. Some puzzles require both thought and dexterity, and firing your friend across a chasm by moving a portal while they freefall through another eventually becomes as normal as walking.

There's a lot of personality in the design of the two robotic protagonists, too - the Laurel and Hardy of shiny metal. When you're working together, you'll be high fiving each other's metal hands and barking possible solutions through your headset.

If you're not using chat, Valve were kind enough to provide lots of ways to communicate in-game, with players able to place markers and emote. Every puzzle solution is punctuated by a dance. Portal 2's co-op is an experience you can't quite replicate, its systems a perfect balance of cooperation and friendly rivalry. Grab a friend and become the most stupid pair of geniuses around. Read more over on John Walker's Portal 2 review.

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Helldivers 2

In like a bullet to the top of this list is the extraordinarily popular Helldivers 2. Robots to the left of you, bugs to the right, here I am stuck in the middle with you, a squad of my pals, merrily immolating all the enemies before us and, quite often, each other.

Helldivers 2 combines a lot of things. Great shooting against horde-style enemies? You betcha. Improbably huge special abilities like actual nukes? Sure thing. Pretending you haven't set off the bomb in the enemy nest and then exploding your mates for the jape? Absotively. The titular Helldivers are teams of hard-hitting expendable soldiers sent to clear enemies on planets surrounding Earth, which is at the centre of a global war with giant bugs on one side and advanced robots on the other, so you head down in timed missions do beat them back a bit. The always-on friendly fire is a daring choice, but one players have embraced, along with furious debates over whether the Terminids or Automatons are the worse enemy to come up against.

Buried in amongst this, though, are hints that actually both murderous robots and murderous insects are the fault of the Super-Earth, though many players enjoy the roleplay aspects of screaming "For democracy!" as they call down an airstrike on a giant monster spitting acid at your mate. Helldivers 2 is simultaneously layered and simple, and it is an instahit Ed Thorn calls a "rare breed of live service co-op shooter" in his Helldivers 2 review.

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Peak

In Peak you control anthropomorphic foam balls who must ascend a sequence of mountains until they reach the titular peak. These mountains range from icy to foresty to magma-laden, all with vines or chains or wobbly bridges connecting portions together. So, while you eat a portion of a snack bar to replenish your energy (represented by a very Breath Of The Wild circle), your mate could be tumbling down a portion of mountain while your other mates cackle.

Climbing is a simple click and hold to grip and release, with a dash of desperate jumping to just reach that ledge. This makes it approachable for anyone 'non-gamery' to hop in and join the hell. And it's nice that there's only a light layer of backpack management (weight affects stamina yada yada) so it doesn't detract from the main goal: reach the peak.

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Abiotic Factor

In Brendy's Advent Calendar shoutout, he called Abiotic Factor "basically a survival Half-Life parody", but one that's "funny and scrappy and it gives the survival genre a delightful new setting". And in a recent interview, the devs said that many game makers are "too focused on mechanics and not enough on vibes". So to sum up, Abiotic Factor is a co-op survival game that's fun and has good vibes.

Not but what does it all really mean? Well, you have to survive a remote facility that's gone wrong. You cook mutant meat and traverse a facility with spaces that'll quake your boots or trams that'll whizz you to vacuous spaces filled with terror or wonder. This is a survival game that prioritises a good laugh rather than forcing you to pick up sticks and rocks to build a hut you can all yawn over. And if you think, "oh well fun doesn't mean depth", you'd be surprised; it goes deep, alright.

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Satisfactory

Matt Cox calls first-person factory builder Satisfactory, a "beautiful daze of ever-escalating industry" in his Satisfactory review. To the uninitiated, you're on a planet whose minerals must be turned into gizmos at a scale that's only limited by you and your pals' ambitions. Build an automated empire replete with power plants and drones that slop sulphur into vats. Erect foundries that feast on ingots. Tie all of it together with automated systems.

All of this building takes place on an alien world with varied biomes and surprises nestled in its canyons and crevices. A jetpack allows you to rocket around it with ease and grin at your hodge-podge engineering from the skies. Sure, you just need to co-ordinate with your friends so things don't get too messy, but this is a management game that truly lets you see how your labours coalesce into a mechanical monstrosity on a frightening scale.

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Grounded

Grounded sees you and your pals get shrunk to the size of a few chickpeas stacked together and your mission is simple: find a way to embiggen yourselves. The trouble is, you're in a garden filled with insects and the insects are massive. For the most part, Grounded is a typical survival game in the sense you'll scavenge and build a base and fend off ladybugs with armour you've popped together from the carcass of a woodlouse (okay maybe that last bit isn't typical). But man, the garden is gorgeous and the world a living ecosystem.

What's neat about Grounded's multiplayer is "Shared Worlds" that allows you to store multiplayer saves on the cloud and share them with friends - for free! So you don't need to be around for your friends to crack on. Put up with the slightly awkward base-building and you've got yourself a real gem here. Read more in Hayden's Grounded review. Grounded 2 is currently in early access and it's shaping up nicely, but we're still recommending the original game until its sequel is finished.

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LEGO Marvel Super Heroes

LEGO Marvel Super Heroes offers a staggering roster (100+) of block-ified super people to roam about New York City and partake in playful puzzling, missions, and the like. John Walker praises New York City as "deeply engrossing" in his LEGO Marvel Super Heroes review, which is quickly navigated by flying heroes like Horsefly Lad and Polevaulter (I have made these two up). Not to mention the fact it's "ludicrously packed with missions, quests, challenges and mini-games".

Crucially, it's drop-in local co-op makes it easy to drop in and platform and smash basically everything to pieces (helpfully). No it's not without its clunky camera controls and intrusive tutorials, but this co-op caper is, even more crucially, family-friendly fun; hard to come by nowadays, you know.