After the success of Overcooked recently, I went hunting for other good couch co-ops, and ran into Death Squared, a puzzler about little cube robots solving puzzles and trying not to get brutally murdered. Either by the different levels or by your "partner".
It's set in a cookie cutter evil corporation, with a malicious AI and a hapless employee administering the tests to the robots, in typical Portal style. They offer wry observations on the various foibles of the robots and their incapability to complete the tests whenever you die. There's also the usual instructional and helpful videos to offer handy sarcasm.
The puzzle styles combine platforming, robot stacking, laser avoiding, block pushing and a bit of barrier manipulation. Your worst enemy in the game is usually your fellow gamer, as they stand on buttons that catapult spikes at you, move lasers so that they are directly pointing at you, or just generally push you off. There also tends to be blocks that are synced to each players movement, and so you need to very carefully move around each other in order to prevent death.
Where Overcooked was something of a joy to play, allowing you to run around at high speed and enjoy a bit of chaos, this is tense. The precise movements required and the slow teamwork mean that you need to co-ordinate very carefully and often move in a step-like fashion, taking a single square at a time. This can get frustrating when a tiny mis-step results in immediate death.
That means everything is much more slow, and either you or your partner will have to simply sit around waiting while the other moves, which isn't really conducive to a fun game. The fact that it's so easy to fail also means that you're going to die a lot, and one of you is going to get annoyed.
Honestly might be better in single player. Still, the graphics are cute, if simple, and the overall feel of the game is one that's currently far too popular - evil, sarcastic AIs are usually fun.
Tagged: Game Puzzle 2.5D Hard difficulty PC Local multiplayer