Developers cannot stop chasing Hazelight Studios. Ever since March 25, 2021, the cooperative gaming market has been trapped in the shadow of a single release, with studios desperately trying to recreate its commercial magic. The latest attempt to break that curse involves mashing together playable mice, Spider-Man style web-swinging, and a massive open world. This kitchen-sink approach to game design reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of cooperative play. Throwing every popular mechanic into a shared sandbox does not magically generate a compelling multiplayer experience. It just creates expensive clutter.
The reality of the PC marketplace is harsh. We are seeing a steady flood of what the community aptly calls friendslop titles like Peak, all desperate to capture couples and friends looking for their next weekend project. The numbers they are up against are staggering. As detailed on the official Steam store page, Electronic Arts and Hazelight are sitting on 47,432 user reviews for It Takes Two, maintaining a 95 percent positive rating overall. Even now, years after launch, 2,472 reviews from the last 30 days hold a 96 percent approval rate. Those figures represent a brick wall for new developers trying to enter the space, forcing them into increasingly bizarre genre mashups just to stand out in the storefront queue.
Are There Any New Co-Op Games Similar to It Takes Two?
The short answer is no, because the current market is entirely focused on scale rather than friction. The defining trait of recent cooperative releases across the PS5, PS4, PC, and Switch is feature bloat. We see marketing campaigns boasting about open-world freedom and physics-based traversal as if size correlates directly to fun. Some players are taking the bait, with Facebook advertisements eagerly proclaiming a New Co-Op Party Game with Very Positive Reviews Is Free to Play to lure in budget-conscious duos. A YouTube review recently praised one of these sprawling sandboxes as a brilliant action-adventure coop game for its sheer volume of map markers. But volume is the exact opposite of what Hazelight built.
Scale is the enemy of forced cooperation. It Takes Two won Game of the Year at the 2021 Game Awards because its design was strictly linear and entirely bespoke. You could not wander off to web-swing across a massive map. You had to stand on a specific button so your partner could cross a specific gap. When a game offers too much freedom, players naturally separate. An open world in a cooperative title frequently results in two people playing single-player games simultaneously in the same server. Related: Stardew Valley’s Success Is a Trap Its Creator Cannot Escape.
The Financial Math of the Friend’s Pass
Mechanics alone do not explain the massive gap between the king of the genre and the chasing pack. The distribution model is where the real battle for player retention takes place. Hazelight solved the biggest friction point in multiplayer gaming by implementing the Friend’s Pass. One person buys the premium game, and they can invite a partner to join for free. This completely bypassed the usual household debate over who has to spend money for a shared weekend activity.
Modern competitors are trying to solve this same problem through vastly different economic models. Some are pivoting entirely to free-to-play ecosystems to lower the barrier to entry, hoping microtransactions will cover the server costs. Others are attempting to position their titles alongside tactical releases like Sunderfolk by targeting the tabletop and strategy crowds. One outlet enthusiastically labeled a recent contender The New Gold Standard For Co-op RPGs based entirely on its accessible entry price and progression systems. Yet building a massive open world with complex physics requires a development budget that free-to-play party mechanics struggle to support over the long term.
The Hardware Reality of Split-Screen Speed
Pushing these massive cooperative experiences onto older hardware complicates the math even further. Releasing a visually dense open world with fast-paced web-swinging on the Switch and PS4 requires aggressive optimization. Hazelight managed their performance budget by tightly controlling the camera and the playable space. You only ever saw what the developers actively wanted to render. Open worlds strip away that control entirely, demanding processing power that older consoles simply lack when rendering two distinct player viewpoints at high speeds. Related: Xbox’s $150 Price Hike and 3,200 Layoffs Expose the Value Myth.
Defenders of these new kitchen-sink designs argue that mashing up genres is the only way to move the medium forward. If players want linear puzzles, they already have a 2021 masterpiece to replay. Therefore, injecting extreme mobility and vast maps into the genre is a necessary evolution to keep the local couch play category fresh and relevant.
That defense ignores how human beings actually interact with cooperative mechanics. High-speed traversal tools are inherently solitary joys. They are about flow, momentum, and individual skill. Cooperative gameplay relies on pacing, communication, and synchronization. When one player can launch themselves across a map at top speed while the other is still figuring out the physics engine, the cooperative bond breaks. The session stops being about working together and becomes a race where one person is constantly waiting for the other to catch up.
The industry needs to stop treating previous successes as a checklist of whimsical ideas to be expanded upon. The mice, the talking books, and the shifting genres were window dressing for an incredibly rigid, heavily playtested core loop. Adding larger maps and faster movement tools does not elevate the cooperative experience. It just gives players more room to ignore each other.
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