After a blissful Valentine’s Day weekend, it’s time to put your relationship to the test the way only a gamer could: with co-op. Multiplayer or co-op games have been a staple of the gaming world since the 1972’s Pong, becoming all the more popular with each decade. While we all love a good LAN Party, it’s also become a new way for couples to bond — or kill each other.
If you truly want to put your partner through the co-op gauntlet and test your romantic mettle, these are the 8 most likely games to ruin your relationship…
But what happens when you survive?
Borderlands
This 2009 game is a co-op shooter classic. Games like Call of Duty and Battlefield and other shooter favorites were out before or around this time, but there’s always been something special about Borderlands. It’s a shooter for loot gremlins, of course, but it’s also a unique world of vault hunters, corporation wars, and quite a few foes obsessed with explosions. Borderlands’ comedy, the characters, and the bombastic combat have always been a unique flavor of fun for co-op shenanigans.
…There’s one problem. When you’re playing with a partner, the little things start to get to you. Stolen loot. Terrible driving. Stealing the kill that would’ve triggered your Second Wind and gotten you back up. Leaving you to bleed out on the ground. While fun, Borderlands is also an inevitable facilitator for frustrated groans and petty arguments about loot-collecting.
Will you keep playing the series and end up a dynamic duo like Athena and Janey, or will your relationship burn up in guns and flames like Moxxi and Marcus?
Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes
If your relationship didn’t end after the seventh time your partner bailed out of the car to drop you into the lava in Borderlands, you might want to take your next game sitting down. But it’s really easy to get your blood up to that lava temp if that game is Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes.
Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is a co-op puzzle game where you and your partner work together to disarm bombs. One of you will have control of the bomb and its different panels to (hopefully) disable them. Meanwhile, the other is flipping through the handbook and giving the bomb diffuser (hopefully) correct information. The puzzles get increasingly difficult as you go — starting with color and light puzzles, then later including word and code conundrums. No doubt, the name of this game is communication and nothing else.
There’s something particularly painful about trying to explain something to your partner while hearing a timer slowly count down. And while the game can’t actually explode on you, it wouldn’t be surprising if you explode on your partner. After failing their fifth bomb in a row, some partners can grow quite frosty.
Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is not all doom and gloom, though. If you’re lucky, you might just learn a thing or two about efficient communication. Nothing quite like learning under pressure to get you and your partner good at talking. Hopefully.
Portal 2
Portal 2 is one of the quintessential co-op games. Whenever you ask for recommendations, it always pops up as a top option. In co-op mode, you play as two robots using portal guns to solve puzzles and get through GlaDos factory. Portal 2 sounds like straight-forward, simple fun.
However, what no one warns you about Portal 2 is how testy it can make you and your co-op partner. As you play, the puzzles get more difficult, and the terrain gets more deadly. And, in that same vein, your partner now gets far more opportunity to harm your robot avatar. They might launch you straight into the void — on accident or on purpose. Failure will send you right back where you started.
Most of the time this game is loads of fun, and you have every right to get upset when you die. But self-regulating your inevitable bursts of angst and annoyance is necessary. Take a deep breath. Think about it. Then go back in for another round. It can theoretically be great practice for learning not to take your frustrations out on your partner.
And if your partner keeps launching you into things because they think your suffering funny, you might also want to take a deep breath and think about if you’re better off out of this relationship.
Helldivers/Helldivers 2
You hate bugs? You like exterminating them? Then the Helldivers series will be a delight for you and your partner. Once a top-down game, this newest first-person shooter is a bug-filled blast, giving players compelling objectives and hordes of monsters to kill.
The problem is that you can kill each other. That’s the danger and the truth about the Helldivers series, whether you pick up the old version or the newest entry. Friendly fire is absolutely not friendly and it can either bring out your partner’s inner malice or can cause a lot of friction if one of you (while well-intentioned) is not the best at aiming between your butt and the bug’s. And nothing feels worse than almost winning a round, then losing at the last second because someone fired a stray bullet into your skull. That’s devastating enough, but considering how difficult these games can be, it’s even worse in the Helldivers series.
This game turns from a cathartic bug-squashing romp into a “murder my loved ones” spree real fast if you can’t deal with the risk of friendly fire. Sometimes, though, this means this is the perfect opportunity to practice forgiveness.
Or setting boundaries and putting Helldivers on the “don’t play together” list. My partner and I have a whole genre on that list: platformers.
Speaking of…
Bread and Fred
There are few co-op games more adorable than Bread and Fred. Two cute adventurous penguins leaving their little igloo village to try to climb to the top of a mountain, meeting adorable characters along the way? Even better, they use the wonders of physics to scale fun and challenging platforming obstacles? What a delight.
Bread and Fred is the best platformer for a couple — if said couple is equally good at platformers. If not, though, that delight and adorableness wears thin quickly. Especially if you and your partner have decided not to use the save feature, as is customary in the default settings.
If you and your partner are hardcore platformers, this game isn’t a threat and will be so much fun — save a bit of frustration when you get unlucky and one wrong jump makes you fall halfway down the mountain. But for couples with unequal ability, the platformer will make your platforming-pro partner die inside the multiple times you miss an easy, important leap and accidentally take both of you back a hundred feet of elevation.
For my fellow platform-sufferers, we welcome a lesson in after-care, for both you and your partner. They should apologize for their frustration and give you a hug, and you should soothe the understandable pain they felt watching you work so hard to ruin every single jump. Victims of Bread and Fred can salvage their relationship, but only if they put in the work.
Heavenly Bodies
If the controls of Bread and Fred didn’t ruin you, don’t worry. It can get worse.
In Heavenly Bodies you play as two astronauts trying to accomplish a variety of space-faring tasks. Given the lack of gravity, though, one failure to grab a rail/door/etc. could result in a dead astronaut. You and your partner have to very carefully maneuver through each challenge to be an effective cosmonaut team. While the game is atmospheric and well-made, its delicate controls and hard-to-navigate gravity physics mean swearing and rage-quitting isn’t uncommon.
However, to keep your relationship together and not look like a raging jerk, Heavenly Bodies will be an exercise in the sister of compromise: letting go. Either lean into the game’s challenges and let yourself have fun with how easy it is to fail, or accept that you two might not be made to finish this game.
If you don’t, you’ll end up arguing until someone leaves the space station and never comes back.
Baldur’s Gate 3
When a co-op game ends up being the best game of 2023, you have to talk about it.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is a sprawling, Dungeons and Dragons-inspired adventure with top-down turn-based combat where you and a party of fascinating characters try to save yourselves from mind flayer tadpoles, cultists, and the end of the world. No big deal.
Despite what you might think, companion romances aren’t the greatest relationship risk in Baldur’s Gate 3. More often than not, you and your partner will actually bond over your favorites. Or, at worst, have to play rock paper scissors on who gets to date Karlach.
The real danger is the combat.
There’s nothing quite like the rage of thinking combat is going well, just for your partner to hit an oil barrel with a fire arrow and blow up everyone in the room. Or having a normal NPC conversation and then your partner picks a deception check, fails it, then starts a fight. You might sit on your floor and stare at the ceiling in anguish. You might “accidentally” stab their character with your sword, just to feel something.
The problem with Baldur’s Gate is that when your partner makes a mistake, it’s not only easy to identify who made the mistake but also it’s quite easy for a mistake to be quite influential on the narrative. And if you aren’t save-scumming, it could leave your relationship trapped in a cold war for hours afterward. One wrong step and the Dror Ragzlin fight could get a lot harder than it already is.
It’s key to remember you’ll both make mistakes. And even if you haven’t, at any moment you could be next. Remember you and your partner are human, and if you can tap into that forgiveness and laughter you’ve been practicing with the other games. Play with grace.
If you do, you’ll remember your Baldur’s Gate 3 playthrough with fondness, not sour heartbreak.
Overcooked/Plate Up
If your relationship can’t stand the heat, we beg you to stay out of the kitchen.
The premises of both Overcooked and PlateUp are fairly similar. In a kitchen space, you and 1-3 partners fill out orders to please customers. For Overcooked the variable is that the kitchen tends to have spatial challenges and obstacles you have to overcome, like moving platforms. In PlateUp, it’s a rogue-like where the customers, time limits, and recipes get harder as you go.
These co-op cooking games are the relationship championships. They demand complicated coordination, game knowledge, teamwork, and — even when things are going well — lots of smooth communication. While the other co-op games can stress certain parts of your relationship, these two games will stress them all. These games will frustrate you, disappoint you, make you feel unheard, make you feel doubt in your partner… they test your patience with yourself and the one you love most.
And worst than that, Overcooked and PlateUp are forcing you to play pretend that you and your partner are doing stress-fueled work together. An actual job. If you don’t do well in balancing your moods, your breath, your forgiveness, your patience, all of it… These games could break you.
Like a runner’s high, though, some people just get through that and feel the euphoria of success on the other side.
Now, if you and your partner have made it all the way to the end and survived the co-op gauntlet, we have bad news. We can’t promise you’re soulmates. However, you and your partner do know how to communicate, come back from petty fights, and coordinate around each other’s strengths and weaknesses.That sounds like a pretty good place for any relationship to start.
Keep gaming, lovers.
