My partner and I occasionally play games together, but they pretty much only play word puzzle games on their own. I'm not very good at word games though, and they don't have very good spatial skills, so we frequently find ourselves mismatched. We have a switch and a single decent gaming pc, and a pretty old laptop.
The biggest hit for us has been Baba is You because it is slow paced, and combines words and logic and spatial reasoning. Our biggest problem was that its not actually coop, so we would just alternate who played, which can disengage the other person. My partner also thought its aesthetic is cute.
Our next positive example is probably Snipperclips is also a pretty slow paced puzzler, is mostly spatial skills, but we could play at the same time. They also liked how interactive the avatars are, and particularly snipping my avatar up.
The first miss is overcooked, it was a bit too chaotic, and my partner felt a little lost and uncoordinated. They don't remember it super well, so we might retry this one at some point if they feel more at home playing video games.
The other miss is Mario Kart, which they liked when we played with 4 player, but not just the 2 of us. I'm significantly better at Mario Kart, and they are pretty competitive. If they get more into games they might be willing to put in some time improving, but not so much right now.
Our worst miss was probably Tricky Towers, I'm decently good at regular Tetris, so I can do okay out of the box at physics based Tetris, but there was too much happening to fast for my partner. Combine that with it the competitive aspect and they didn't enjoy this one at all.
The games they most fondly remember from childhood are Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero, though we have downstairs neighbors under part of our apartment and no dance pad or guitars, SSX Tricky, and the Lord of the Rings movie tie in games.
They think they'd enjoy a game that does movement as input like ddr or guitar hero but is maybe less bouncy, and are open to action games, or games with a story, but they should be easier to control and not be too chaotic. Cute aesthetics and cats are a plus.
Thanks!
Edit: Everybody gave great recommendations! We picked up It takes two and pizza possum. Just finished the first chapter of it takes two and we had a blast, and I might even be able to get another game night in this weekend if we can be on top of chores. I'll keep checking in this thread for more ideas for future games to try! Thanks again!
We're competative I suppose. Grew up playing and nothing ever replaced it. There's probably other arcade games we'd enjoy but the closest we've come was the Tetris Effect - but we haven't picked that up again for a while. Tricky is one of those games that has a huge skill difference between being good and actually practicing. It's fun, a bit janky - maybe it's just what we know. My brother has a couple high scores on my steam deck and writing this has inspired me to go spend some time trying to beat them lol
Glad you are enjoying it. Any advice on getting it up and running on a steam deck? Just got one a few months ago and havent looked into emulation yet but intended to, life just got in the way and havent gone back to it yet. Maybe you can inspire me to get my some old tony hawk games running. Loved the ps era skater games
Yeah, there's something called Emudeck, it makes setup super easy. Even comes with tools to add emulated games into your steam library to launch like a regular game.
There is this one funky caveat - the PlayStation and Switch games I emulate didn't run very well, after some research I found out that lowering the CPU cores helps a ton. And it did, they run great for me now. To do that I had to install a Deck extension called Powertools - super easy to do because Emudeck came with a user interface to install plugins, Powertools included. Anyway, with Powertools you turn off this thing called SMT and then can lower the CPU cores. Some people think it's actually a bug in emulation or Steam Deck drivers because using less cores shouldn't have a big impact on performance so it may not be necessary in the future.
Tons of video examples on YouTube make the install and setup super easy. Highly reccomend setting emulation up, I've been playing through games I never finished as a kid and it's been great. The convenience makes it awesome