My fiancee and I have decided on a median, commonality, hobby, entertainment, or whatever you want to refer to it as, that we can both garner enjoyment from together. Of course I am talking about video games, but not the typical cutesy kind that is so often written about, I mean, sure, cooperative is a mode we can all agree on as the best option for couples to play on, but there is no harm in competition either. The violent kind, the aggressive kind, the shit talking kind, the kick each others ass kind.
However, I will still be listing quite a view titles that are exclusively cooperative due to both their appeal and work together factor. In many ways this is good practice for you and your partner to work problems out together and find a solution, probably more often one of you is figuring out how to save the others ass. Which, in real life, is way more common than you might think. These are the titles that my now fiancee and I grew our relationship on, and had a ton of fun doing.
This article will mainly be the story of what my Fiancee and I played together, and still do, prior to our engagement.
First will have to be Transformice.
So Transformice…was something that my girlfriend discovered while browsing the free games offered on Steam. We had just met and because we live a fair distance from each other, we were looking for activities we could enjoy together despite the distance. My first suggestion was finding a video game we could play together at any time of the day over the internet. This was the method that I was adept at using to keep in touch with my friends from all across the world, and I thought it would be a good way for us to casually learn about each other.
She downloaded the game and instantly referred it to me. When we started we were not anything more than friends and we hadn’t tested out the word love yet. We entered this game, and like curious mice, we began playing it together night after night adapting and learning the new level designs that other players created for us to play on. The game was cute, you were a mouse trying to collect as much cheese as possible. Your team had a “Shaman” who was capable of building things and aiding the other mice to the block of cheese.
Obviously, the team often relied on the Shaman to gather the cheese, and again to lead them to the mouse hole. The object of the game was to touch the block of cheese and carry a slice back to the mouse hole. Retrospectively, it played very much like Lemmings, most of your teammates were suicidal and clumsy, falling into chasms or jumping into lava. The game is 2D, making it similar to a sidescroller but most of the levels were entirely on a single screen. The more creative level designers made triggers that unlocked advances into the level, which was required to gather the cheese.
It took us awhile to learn that the cheese could be used as commodity to purchase attire for your mouse. Before long we were wearing bunny suits, frog suits, zombie skins, skeleton skins, and egg shell hats. I couldn’t tell you how many options are available, just know that there were many. Some were easy to attain while others were damn near impossible. Allow me to explain my favorite part of this game and why it is so good to play with your soul mate. Mind you, we started playing this game during Valentine’s Day, and one of the levels was a dreamy pond with a Ferris wheel. The objective of this level was to locate and kiss your soulmate.
There are certain levels that tie a red string between you and your soulmate. The soulmate partner is selected at random unless you have married someone in the game. This string is a rope that you use to dangle one mouse over the edge of a platform from while you drag them towards the cheese on the other side. Then once one mouse has gathered the cheese, they swap. This requires coordination and teamwork, which most of us are terrible at because our soulmates were random. If one mouse were to simply jump off the edge of the map, the other one is going down too.
So anyway, I started dating my mouse on March 10th the following month. Naturally, due to our excitement for finding someone to adventure into the future with, we got married in the game. We knew this was pretend, it was a way for us to get a feel for things. It was fun to imagine us being together forever, cooperative partners until the day that we die. It was unbearably cute. Now whenever there was a soulmate match, it was us bound together by this string. We usually used it to mess around and ended up killing each other, but when we tried we always succeeded. That tested out our problem solving skills.
Another component to this game that I forgot to mention before we started dating is the postcards. You win these items in the mini games during holiday events. We first discovered them during Valentine’s Day, and at the time we weren’t using the word love, but we were heavily hinting towards a mutual feeling shared between us using these postcards. She knew I had a thing for the reaper, and I teased her about crowning her my reaper and giving her the scythe. She thought that was morbid for awhile, until she figured out what it meant. Then she sent me this.
And here we are now…
Second on this list is going to be Farm Together.
Farm Together was an anniversary gift from my fiancee on our first year together. It was in early access at the time, and I had been introducing her to Steam and the convenience of a digital distribution system. I had never heard of Farm Together at the time, she found it herself and I vaguely remember her asking me if I’d be interested in farming with her. I was thinking it was going to be a game on Facebook, but I was certainly wrong.
The game is exactly as it suggests by its title alone. It will make you think of many other farming games, but this one isn’t for introverts (although you can lock your farm and go at it alone if you wish to). At the time it was relatively basic, you dug plots, and planted seeds. You grew crops that when reaped awarded you with experience points and coins. You would turn right around after the harvest and purchase new (and more) plots with accompanying seeds for the crops that you can afford.
There is a quest system to go along with the farming to give you objectives. The quests are simple, comprised of harvesting a number of a certain crop. Upon completing a quest you would be rewarded a sum of experience points and additional coins. This would hopefully allow you to invest into bigger and better crops that would grant even more coins. When you have had enough sowing and reaping, you could invest coins into decorations and stands that would buy your crop in bulk for diamonds.
Diamonds are treated as the second level currency. You would invest diamonds into fancier things and practical farming equipment. Such as gasoline for your tractor, the tractor is given to you early on after acquiring 2 medals (another currency given by completing quests) and buying a gas pump with them. I’m talking way too much about the game mechanics and not enough about the multiplayer component. It is simple, you visit each others farms and help out with the permissions that the farmer gives you.
There was very little reason to help each other out in the beginning. I suppose they assumed socializing and being friendly with other farmers was enough motivation to visit other farms. They added a power that fills up as you help harvest on another farm, this power once full grants double the experience points back on your own farm for 30 minutes. This was a nice addition, but it gives other players a reason to leave your farm as soon as they can and attend to their own.
If you’re farming with your girlfriend, boyfriend, wife, husband, fiance, fiancee, whomever they may be, it is certainly much more enjoyable, as I would assume you like being in each others company. One more thing, probably the most cooperative part of the game is that you can help each other out with your farms quests. If they give you enough permissions, you may purchase, plow, harvest, move objects, and add objects, which can all assist in completing quests for the farm owner.
Did I mention how cute the game actually is? Graphically, it is cell-shaded, the customization options are fruitful, you can select clothing, hair style, hair color, gloves, no gloves, glasses, no glasses (and shades), hats, no hats, freckles, face paint and facial hair. You can customize your tractor in whichever way suits your style, it can be a cute pink little Tonka truck with a little rubber ducky antenna topper, or a big dark tractor with a sinister hood and a skull antenna topper to express how vicious you are.
They added the ability to construct houses later. There is a Tree House, a Cabin, Mansion and a bunch of other varieties of homes to build. I had to build one of each, but they aren’t just for decoration. You can enter them, furnish the interior, and build functional objects such as stoves, painting canvases and pianos. You can cook a selection of dishes including Cheesecake and Sushi, then play songs on the Piano like Old MacDonald’s Farm. Each time you complete a dish, song or painting, you are awarded with tickets which you use to purchase items for your home with.
Last and definitely not least, one of my favorite components to Farm Together (and a more recent addition to the game), is the ability to have a pet follow you around on your farm. I believe it is between a dog or a cat right now, but they too can be customized to the detail. If you and your significant other want a casual and relaxing game to play together when you have that precious free time to kill, I highly recommend Farm Together. It is still being improved on and you’ll find new crops, trees, animals, decorations, homes and other things being added every so often.
Now we come to the third selection, this one being a little more intense. You may have heard of it, the multiplayer component of Don’t Starve, Don’t Starve Together!
The reason I call this one more intense is that it is a pure survival game. You can play it in a variety of ways but we prefer to try and survive together. The game is designed to allow backstabbing, robbing, burning, destroying and simply making another players attempt to survive a living hell. The game is hard enough to survive without the sabotage. I had the original game in my Steam library since it began early access, but hadn’t touched it much. I feel like the survival genre is better played with others.
My girlfriend had been watching popular Youtubers such as Markiplier play games for awhile, and she had seen Don’t Starve before. They gave early adopters of the game a free copy of Don’t Starve Together, but I didn’t have anyone to try it out with. I had tried it out with a friend in the past but it isn’t very much fun for a couple of clueless newbies. Most of what we did was wander around and pick fights with spiders who quickly made an end to our lives.
Anyway, this is a survival game, a very difficult one at that. It takes awhile to play, unless you know how to modify the world settings to very quickly advance you and your buddies to a stage that normally takes hours to reach. My girlfriend and I enjoyed starting from the beginning of a default world. As the seasons passed we spent our time collecting food, storing it where it would last, and trying to craft clothing for the winter. Basically, all we did was prepare for winter, because that was normally as far as we got. We made ear muffs and little fur coats.
However, it was never enough, because we also had to prepare for the attacks from the hell hounds who quickly broke down our walls and made meat sandwiches out of us. It was always a challenge and we never regretted investing the time in getting to winter, we only wished we could learn how to survive it. It does get tiring after a few consecutive plays of gathering wood and flint to begin a little fire that normally only lasted the night. If you found some stone you could build a more permanent one that would last until you needed to relocate your camp for resources.
The game is relatively difficult to explain, but the challenges that it presented allowed my girlfriend and I to grow as teammates and learn how to help each other survive, sometimes at the cost of our own rations. It was about sacrifice, loss, and perseverance. When one of us died, we would be burdened with a deep feeling of despair. We would locate a resurrection shrine or build a Telltale heart which came at a health cost to the player using it. As well as a permanent decrease in the overall health of the player resurrected. It was always a priority to bring the other back. It’s an emotional thing.
We did get through winter once, and entered spring, where we encountered another challenge, and they are called raining frogs. They eat everything you have, including you. I remember something about it raining so much that land masses were flooding. All I know is that there is a lot to learn in this game, and it is always exciting to see how far you can get, because one thing is for certain, you will die.
Finally we have Overwatch.
Overwatch is a fantastic team oriented game for you and your lover to battle head to head in. The reason this game was phenomenal to us is that we chose roles that complemented each other. She was a tank (D.Va) as I was a healer (Mercy). I kept her patched up and she caused as much wreckage as she possibly could. In many ways Overwatch is like Team Fortress 2, some have even accused it of being a cheap imitation by Bizzard.
The game is class based, you have your typical roles. The meat, known as the Tank, the cushion, known as the healer, the stability, known as the support, and the favorite, the DPS, or damage dealers. The teams are comprised of six heroes, each one can only be chosen once. There are common compositions, such as 3 tanks and 3 healers, or 2 tanks, 2 healers and 2 damage dealers, but in the lower ranks (bronze), people pretty much choose whatever they want and adapt to the competition.
Personally, I really enjoy playing the Soldier but when I am playing in the ranked league I wait for my team to choose their heroes and I choose one that fills where we lack. Normally, people stay away from a dedicated healer, so I am normally Mercy, whom I happen to be pretty good at as a damage dealer too. Although I get a lot of shit for using my pistol instead of my healing staff. I also like to play as Lucio when we need an area of effect heal or it’s on a map with ledges to push people off of.
The maps oscillate between two different objectives. One is attack and defense, while the defensive team tries to prevent the offensive team from delivering a ‘payload’ to its destination. The payload comes in a couple of forms but it is pretty much always a cart on a track that slowly progresses while a member of the attacking team is touching it, but pauses if someone on the defensive side is also touching it. So the idea is to push the opposing team away from the cart and hold it.
The other objective type is control, which is similar to games like Battlefield 2, where you capture a point and hold it. The only way to capture a point is to get all individuals from the opposing side away from its vicinity. The team who has it captured fills up a percentage. Once it reaches 100% the team who is holding it wins. If one person from the other team is on it when your side reaches 99% it is cast into overtime, this gives the other team an opportunity to bring it back.
The reason this game is a good one for couples is that two people working together can add quite the force to a team. I can’t remember the number of times we’ve been able to turn the odds around and win a game at the last second. She is an aggressive D.Va and jumps right into battle, as I am an aggressive healer and I stay on her ass the entire time. Sometimes I lose her and have to hold my own with my little pellet gun, but I’m proficient at it.
Sometimes she’ll play as Hammond, or The Wrecking Ball, the Hamster in a mechanized ball. She’ll tether her ball to the objective and swing around it as quickly as she can just to buy our team enough time to secure the point. This has been the winning strategy more than once. While she is Hammond I’ll be Lucio because sometimes she swings too quickly to maintain contact with Mercy’s healing staff. As long as I am near her as Lucio she’ll be healed. All the while Lucio can bump people away from the point.
Those two heroes complement each other when all we’re trying to do is keep the other team from holding or capturing a point. We don’t have to kill them, we just have to keep them away from the objective. D.Va is a pretty good partial tank and partial damage dealer, especially when she charges her ultimate and self-destructs. Her damage is on par with some of the damage dealers if it is amplified with Mercy’s alternative to healing. Which increases a heroes damage by 20%.
This is the first game I have mentioned that was competitive and involved us fighting toe to toe with other players. It is the perfect game for a couple to play together, I’ve been with teams where two players were basically the entire team. It is possible to win matches with just two who play their roles well, back to back. Sometimes we’re really good, sometimes we’re not, but it still feels good to take on other players together. Originally, we shared an account, but it went on sale in a humble bundle and I got her a copy as well.
Although that is only four games, they were the roots that fed our relationship. We just had to make sure we watered it with time. I will probably post more about this particular subject over time. I didn’t mention Battleblock Theatre or Cuphead, both of which are fantastic cooperative games. I am just now getting back into writing, and I realize my ability to convey things is sloppy. Give me some time to break myself back in. It’s something I wish I had never lost touch with.