Hi guys!
Soon I’ll be traveling and visiting family. I’d like to be able to hook my Steam Deck to their TV and let their kids have a rip at couch multiplayer games allowing up to 4 simultaneous players. The good ole classic WiiU Mario Kart is there and been played until exhaustion by now, so I’d be happy if I had more titles (either SD-compatible or just plain emulated) at the ready if they wanted to try.
Thanks!
I see many mentions of Overcooked. I find that PlateUp! has more meat to bite into than Overcooked.
River City Girls is free on Epic right now. Side-scroller fighting game a la Ninja Turtles. Only 2P though.
SpeedRunners, Ultimate Chicken Horse, Duck Game, Towerfall Ascension, and Stick Fight are some of my favorites. Crawl is also really good, but a bit more complex so depends on the age of the kids. Also can never go wrong with a platform fighter, Rivals of Aether 2 is great.
Moving Out and Overcooked are my favorite co-op games right now. Both have more than 1 title in the series, and, so far, none of them have been bad.
Speedrunners
It’s on sale for $3 right now. Awesome 4 player competitive racing game without split screen so everyone gets maximized view. Way different than Mario Kart so it won’t be a repetitive experience for them. This is the Steam-based couch coop that’s lasted longest in my friends group.
Tricky Towers
Tetris game, but the catch is you build upwards to a finish line and physics play a role, so the tower can lean and collapse.
TowerFall Ascension
Competitive platformer shooter. No split screen. One large screen for everyone. My favorite aspect is all the options you can change to switch up the gameplay. Coop mode and PvP mode.
Mount Your Friends
A personal favorite of mine. Not necessarily for kids, even though I don’t think it’s anything beyond maybe PG-13. It’s hilarious. It can be pretty competitive. You can choose to build upwards or outwards. I think outwards is more fun. You can watch gameplay videos and determine if it’s appropriate for the kids in question.
Others have pointed out games like A Way Out, the Trine series, and Split Fiction. Those are all great. But they’re longer, story-based puzzle games that take more time than you may have for them to finish. Trine allows 3 players, but the others only allow 2.
Can second SpeedRunners. They’ve even announced SpeedRunners 2 recently. The only downside with the game is that when you master the mechanics in the game you can’t really play with your friends anymore, unless they are also keeping up. But even then I think I played the game many tens of hours with my friends before I got addicted and got ahead of them.
Mount Your Friends also has a 3D version (Mount Your Friends 3D) which is even more hilarious and adds new challenge given the full 3D-ness. 😃
I had a lot of fun with TMNT: Shredders Revenge
It’s a super fun sidescroller that sends you back to the good old SNES times.
You can play with up to four players.
The only downside, it’s relatively short, especially for the price they ask. I think it’s curently on sale though.
Cuphead.
I found Brotato to be fun.
If you like 80’s action movies, there is Broforce.
Duck Game is good as a platform shooter.
don’t sleep on Portal 2
Agreed, although it’s wise to have a backup option for this. It’s entirely possible that you have two solid Portal players go at this, which should be a really fun romp. However, in my experience, any skill gap between the players usually turns every stage into “how do I carry my friend through this puzzle?” An extreme version of this can be seen in Game Grumps’ playthrough.
One of my favorite in-person MP games of all time is Towerfall Ascension. My family and I used to spend so much time laughing out loud while playing that game. So many ridiculous trick shots with all the power ups. I haven’t tried it on Steam Deck, but I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work, assuming you can get multiple controllers connected.
Strong, STRONG recommendation for checking out Hypercharge: Unboxed.
It’s an amazing mix of aesthetic from Army Men: Sarge’s Heroes on the N64 and the Toy Story 2 Action Game with the PvP gameplay of the former and PvE gameplay of any famous shooter from the past 20 years.
To top it off, the level of detail put into every damn corner of the game is to die for. Customizable action figure player characters, all the NPC enemies are recognizable toys that react exactly as you expect (i.e. Beyblades that spin out into pieces when destroyed, and plastic soldiers that melt when shot with a flamethrower), and the environments are all lovingly designed and decorated. It’s the perfect modern couch-co-op game.
Thanks a lot! How many split-screen players are allowed? Only two, or does it go up to 4?
It supports up to 4. Full disclosure I haven’t tried split screen on the Deck, but I fully believe it’s worth a shot
I mean for split screen I’d be hooking it up to a TV. It’s too tiny for 4 ppl to cram their heads and try to figure what’s going on. Thanks!
I was having fun with my 5 year old and It Takes Two, but the damned wasp boss level cut our adventure short. It proved too much for the kid
You might have saved him from a rather…traumatic experience right on the next chapter :)
Welp… Good to know
I greatly enjoyed It Takes Two with my wife.
Currently on split fiction by the same developers, it’s amazing as well but a bit more challenging. A Way Out is also decent but we strongly disliked the end.
Unraveled 2 was also very nice but a bit darker.
That’s interesting that you thought split fiction was harder than it takes two. My partner and I thought the opposite, since split fiction seems to let you get away with skipping a lot of things when one of you is dying (i.e. checkpoint reached by one player counts for both of you). In saying that my other theory is my partner has actually gotten better at games since we played it takes two.
D&D Chronicles of Mystara (side-scrolling co-op) I think is 4-player
Cuphead - 2 player
A Hat In Time - 2 player
Streets of Rogue - up to 4 players
Vampire Survivors - I think 2 player for local co-op?
Most of the old Telltale games have co-op in the form of voting for responses
Binding of Isaac: Rebirth has full co-op now, I think up to 4 player. You may need the DLC for the best co-op experience
Crypt of The Necrodancer has solid couch co-op
Baldur’s Gate 3 has a full split-screen 2-player couch co-op mode. Both players need to use a controller. Works great.
I can’t help but laugh at the idea of a couple of 8 year-olds playing through Baldur’s Gate 3 lol.
Lmao, that’ll teach me not to skim ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
A lesser known multiplayer game that’s less co-op and more competitive fun is ultimate chicken horse. It’s a super silly game where everyone compete platform style to reach the end of a stage, but each round everyone places another trap. It can get pretty funny pretty quick!
Recommend using the in game cheat to unlock all stages so there’s more variety right away
Assault Android Cactus!
