5 Best Games on PC and Consoles to Test Your Friends and Family

Playing alone can sometimes be very boring. Playing competitive games online can often lead to nervousness. Playing in a one-way format, with the other person just watching, gets boring quickly.

It is at this point that the question usually arises:What should we play together?“And, in fact, there are a lot of options. The Nintendo Switch alone is the king of couch gaming with friends, but other consoles from the past generation have plenty to choose from.

I have collected for you 5 of the best examples of online cooperative games, and “for the sofa” Call your friends, let’s play together:

Let’s get scared with The Dark Pictures Anthology

There is such a good old tradition – to get together and watch a crowd of some horror films, preferably in the slasher genre. It would be good if the characters there were as stupid as possible, so that you could also root for the maniac.

The developers of Supermassive Games tried to transfer this experience as interactively as possible.

The Dark Pictures anthology is primarily appreciated for its variety of settings. So, for example, the first part is strongly reminiscent of the film “Ghost Ship”, the second boldly refers to Silent Hill, the third is reminiscent of the film “Descent” and, suddenly, a war movie about the American army, and the last one, the fourth one, flirts with the setting of a house with traps . . Often local (terribly simple and limited independence, which is even a plus) history refers to real events.

This game has two modes for playing in a group. The first is online multiplayer, where two players can choose their characters and play in parallel with each other. And in the second mode, you can get together with up to five friends and play together on the same screen using local co-op. In the second mode, the game goes much better, according to personal feelings.

If you like it, then from the same developers there is Until Dawn with a popular concept and Hidden Agenda with high gameplay using PlayLink technology. But for the latter you will need to find a PS 4 and download a special application.

🛒 Select The Dark Pictures Anthology: Season One (all parts) on Steam

Let’s test our friendship’s strength in the Overcooked duology!

Not horror movies, though. united. True, the gameplay of Overcooked can easily lead to mutual injury, I checked it personally. The premise of Overcooked is very simple – you take on the role of a cafe employee and you need to serve customers.

The dishes, in principle, are not complicated – soups, burgers, salads, etc. But it will be expensive to cooperate and fine-tune the process of preparing them.

There are from 2 to 4 people in the kitchen at the same time – someone is cutting vegetables, someone is frying cutlets, someone is washing dishes. It sounds innocent until someone starts making a careless mistake that leads to losing the level.

And the levels here are only simple at first. The further into the game, the more madness there is, and the kitchen may well turn out to be a pirate ship falling apart, and here the victims are using their communication skills and coordination to the maximum. Well, or quarrel in the process and go home, so that later you can remember how you failed to complete the level with the ball, because someone constantly prevented you from getting to the stove.

🛒 Overcooked! on Steam
🛒 Overcooked! 2 on Steam

Getting genuine emotions in the Super Mario Party series

As I said above, the Nintendo Switch is just about the best console for parties. Examples of use in a company that I even cited in a separate article a year ago. For those who missed it, read here.

From all this comes a unique project for the company, the Mario Party series stands out. “Switch” has three full-fledged parts with delicious content for several dense and long evenings.

The trick of Mario Party is its extreme ease of learning and addictiveness. The game always politely asks if there are any new players among the players, and then the rules are clear and where to press in general (there aren’t that many buttons, one “joycon” is enough to play), and then you are led to the playing field.

At its core, its part is a large board game with a bunch of mini-games and mechanics. To describe everything would ruin the impression. You need to try this on your own and preferably as unprepared as possible, then it will be fun, I guarantee it.

And if you like it, then you can look deep into the Switch library and find the brawler-fighting game Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, racing classics like Mario Kart and much more interesting things.

🛒 Super Mario Jamboree Party Page on Nintendo Store

Solving family problems in “It Takes Two”

Interesting situation. Yusuf Farres is even known in various areas of the gaming industry, which periodically opens and sends obscenities to all sorts of different prizes, awards and other big events.

For example, it is he who owns the famous “Fuck Oscar!” and “Well, now we’ll show you some serious ****” (in the original he selectively and charismatically swears in the camera on millions of views). But at the same time, his games always win prestigious awards, and his studio makes almost the best projects for family graphics.

need two(title game of 2021, by the way) may well be considered the best game for married couples in the industry.

Even here there is an interesting plot. Briefly, a married couple is preparing for divorce and does not hide this fact from their daughter. However, the girl’s reaction leads to unexpected consequences. Cody and May (the so-called grieving parents) are turned into drawings and examined in the film for the magic book. And she, in turn, begins to cynically treat ex-spouses without five minutes with the help of experimental tests, which simply do not work without close interaction.

It requires two simple overcomings of various game situations and genre mechanics. Here, puzzles are solved by pandemics (of all possible types: from logical to spatial), and with enemies they determine the manner of playing in the “diabloid” genre, and even allow for an extremely complex moral situation, from which… Well, my wife and I wanted to turn off the game, to be honest . And all this in a simply beautiful visual style that is strongly reminiscent of Pixar animated films.

And if you really like it, I recommend paying attention to Farres’s last game – the crime drama A Way Out. She is also cooperative, and also very cool.

🛒 It takes two on Steam

We spend thousands of hours in Baldur’s Gate III.

Well, at the end of the list, I offer, perhaps, the most obvious and best option for a cooperative game, which will be VERY addictive. And by coincidence, this is also Game of the Year, only for 2023

A lot has already been said about Baldur’s Gate III (including by me here in several materials), so I won’t repeat myself too much. BG III is the best adaptation of the Dungeons and Dragons board game to date and one of the most comprehensive ROLE-PLAYING games in the world.

The game, in fact, provides a huge number of opportunities for roleplaying and creating your own adventures in a huge world. There are a lot of forks and possibilities. And all this works quietly in cooperative mode. Get together with friends, take your characters and go ahead and play villains or good guys. Or all together. Or rant for hours about the genocide of a tiefling settlement. Or one of you will become a paladin, and all your heroes are not the most holy people, and your paths will diverge, but in the end you will defeat the illithids together, despite your differences. And then a crowd will come to the bar to discuss what happened during the last gaming session, which took a good 5 hours of real time from you.

Baldur’s Gate III can draw in a group of players for weeks and even months of continuous and not always staged gameplay. The game brings a lot of interesting events, from which you can always exit in different ways. And most importantly, you can play both online and together on one screen. The experience is indescribable.

🛒 Baldur’s Gate III on Steam

It’s always more fun together

Of course, the attentive reader will notice the complete absence of fighting games among the examples. But with them everything is simple: they are smart and know the genre, so here you have Street Fighter VI and Guilty Gear: Strive. You don’t really want to learn combos and understand military equipment, but you just want to press buttons and make it look beautiful, then Tekken 8 will help you.

With shooters, it’s even easier: the Call of Duty series is suitable for koopas and shooting at each other, even on the same screen, and Borderlands is suitable for particularly long cooperative sessions. Well, if you want simpler role-playing games, then welcome to Diablo IV and Path of Exile 2.

There are plenty more examples that can be given, but you always need to understand where to start, and personally I think that the examples above are the best to start with. The main thing is to always have loved ones nearby who share your hobbies and are ready to learn something new.

With this thought I voice to you: “Have a nice day!”