Partnership survival sits at the front of every entry because it is the figure that survives disagreement. A game can be beautifully made and still run out of reasons for two people to sit down together, and this index is arranged to make that visible.
Deep-sea salvage for two. The longest partnership in the file and the only game here that taught us a language instead of giving us one.
Mountain rescue for two, technically superb and the clearest illustration in this file of what a skill gap does to a friendship.
One cab, two jobs, and a game built almost entirely from reading things aloud to another person. Unglamorous and quietly excellent.
One light, three players, and the most deliberately engineered argument we have had in a game. Twenty-one hours and no regrets.
Two-cook kitchen game, fast and forgiving for three regions and then abruptly not. The point at which a co-op game starts producing blame is usually a design decision, and here it is dated and numbered.
Four-player firefighting with genuinely interesting equipment and a friendly-fire model that consistently blames the player standing still.
Two-player harbour management with a strong first eight hours and a mid-game that quietly becomes single-player while the second person watches.
Warehouse co-op with excellent physical comedy and no reason at all to keep playing after the fourth shift. Survival ended by boredom rather than friction.
Three-player signal repair that requires one player to sit alone in a separate room of the map for minutes at a time. Ingenious, and lonely in a way it did not intend.
Mining co-op whose progression rewards splitting up, which means two people bought a game together in order to play two separate games in the same world.
Haulage for two with beautiful roads and a co-op layer that amounts to a passenger seat. The second player has nothing to do that matters.
Four-player dungeon crawling where the difficulty scales per player but the loot does not, so every additional friend makes the game measurably worse.
Gentle two-player smallholding game with nothing wrong with it and nothing in it that needs a second person. Pleasant, and pointless in company.
Two-player river crossing with a shared health pool and no way to revive a downed partner, which produces the highest rate of session abandonment we have recorded.
Asymmetric two-player defence in which one role is genuinely interesting and the other is a spreadsheet. Forty minutes before the spreadsheet player left.
A puzzle game requiring both players to hold identical mental models of a rotating structure, which is a fine idea and an unpleasant twenty-eight minutes.
Three-player traversal with a shared camera. The shortest partnership in the file at twelve minutes, and the only game we stopped without finishing the first area.
A four-player heist game at nineteen hours and counting, and a two-player farming simulation we have not yet played past its tutorial region.
