Curious about this new segment? Click here! Otherwise feel free to read on!
It’s only natural to want to share the hobbies that bring you joy with the people you love. While many of my friends share my passion for games, I am ever fortunate that my partner K enjoys them too. Best of all, she’s willing to try titles that are outside her usual comfort zone.
It can be a challenge to find the right type of game for each of us, that elusive middle of the Venn diagram between challenge and accessibility. This difficulty simply makes it more exciting when we do find that rare gem, and we can’t help but want to share it with others too. It’s in this spirit that I bring to you yet another potentially recurring segment, Kooped Up.
This segment is meant to share and celebrate the two-player (or more) cooperative or competitive games that we’ve had success with, while also voicing opinions from our differing angles on the hobby to help persuade you. We may be approaching this as a couple, but whatever kind of relation you have to your gaming accomplice we still think that you’ll be able to resonate with one of our perspectives.
If you’re someone who has a lot of experience in the medium, and needs to feel a certain amount of challenge or novelty to stay excited, perhaps you’ll find more value in my thoughts. I may be able to give you shorthand explanations of genres, how cooperative elements function, or the unexpected fun of a given game. If you’re newer or more apprehensive about the hobby, maybe K will be able to pique your interest or soothe your apprehensions. While she’s got a few games under her belt now, she’ll still be your best source of information regarding aspects like the difficulty of the controls, what kind of vibes to expect, or her favourite parts you should look forward to.
I also feel it’s worth briefly explaining my little jokey name, Kooped Up. Obviously it uses my partner’s initial, implies the closeness of a shared-space, and also hints towards co-op games. It’s not the neatest but it works, just like us. Man I wish there were more couch co-op games, because Kouch Ko-Op is right there!
The Pitch
In Ember Knights you are tasked with travelling through a series of themed worlds and clearing randomly-generated rooms of their evil occupants, be they bugs, robots, or even roided-out werewolves.
To survive you’re going to have to learn how each enemy fights and how to dance around them, collect combat skills like a fiery breath or a friendly ballista, and upgrade your abilities between inevitable deaths with a few simple currencies.
The real fun begins once you’ve played enough to understand what items and abilities are worth collecting and which would complement your teammate’s powers. As your confidence grows you will also inevitably speed up and start tearing through the initial dungeons, and experience the thrill of clearing rooms without even being hit.
Even once the game starts to feel a bit too familiar, there are still plenty of secret mechanics and rooms to discover at your own pace, and additional challenges like boss rush or daily dungeons with unique modifiers to keep it interesting.
B note – ‘We got in to a fun routine of high-fiving after perfect rooms, which is an oddly nice end to the adrenaline rush’
For those who play a lot,
It is quite similar in play to games like Hades or Cult Of The Lamb, but the cooperative elements are as refreshing as they are rewarding. There’s nothing more thrilling than dying from overconfidence, and now finding yourself acting as your teammate’s cheerleader as they have to clutch victory from the jaws of defeat.
B note – ‘It was nice to take on the tankier roles while K was more inexperienced, I got to immerse myself in a more challenging playstyle without it feeling uneven.’
It can take a little while to unlock a big enough variety of items to feel this roguelike hit its stride. But once elements like skill upgrades have been unlocked you start making harder decisions on your runs, and the best path forward becomes less obvious. Likewise some elements of the hub world are gate-kept by how far you have progressed through the game’s worlds, rather than the accrual of a metacurrency. This lead to a bit of frustration when we were struggling to conquer the third world’s boss, but felt that we weren’t being given enough new toys or upgrade options after our disheartening deaths.
Once you have learned enemy attack patterns and have a few floors comfortably under your control, the opening stages can become a little repetitive and boring. Luckily there are counters to this, as there are rewards for beating each floor under a certain time, items that grant permanent benefits for hitless rooms, and boss variants to keep runs from feeling stale. There’s also a fantastic array of customisable difficulty options available after beating it for the first time, which greatly benefits its replayability.
For those who are apprehensive,
This is a genre where combat can look a lot more complex than it is, in reality it’s quite simple here but has room for casual mastery. For example, most attacks and skills can be charged up and have cool additional effects if you time it perfectly, which creates a fun rhythm when using weapons that you’ve become accustomed to.
There is also a lot of room for personal expression, and this is usually in your choice of skills or items during a run, but especially in the unlockable weapons where at least one will resonate with your preferred playstyle. For example, I loved the hammer because of its in-your-face chaos and destruction, while K preferred the bow as it let her keep distance from enemies while she was still grappling with the dodging mechanics.
K note – ‘I love any game that gives me a runway to strut down, and I liked to start every run by picking out a cool outfit from the cosmetics we unlocked’
It can be really fun finding what combo of weapons and skills works best for your team’s individual preferences, especially when you’ll so often end up relying on each other. On the subject of teamwork, there is one feature I should warn you about as it’s in my opinion a bit unkind. Between floors on each run, you get a simple progress screen showing your stats so far, and doling out Mario Party style awards. It’s a cute idea, but unfortunately they can also hand out negative trophies like ‘Took the most damage‘, which always felt oddly cruel. Don’t kick me when I’m already down, meanie. They don’t do anything, so you can just ignore them, but you should get vicious revenge on anyone who mentions yours than later receives one of their own.
K note – ‘Some rooms were really tall and scrolled vertically, but because the camera doesn’t zoom out it would struggle if we went in opposite directions. I liked to punish B for mentioning my negative trophies by making it so he couldn’t reach who he was fighting. Take that, you bastard!’
Healing and powerup items are also distributed so that each player could pick up an even amount, but me and K found it more sensible to split it however felt ‘even’ to us. If I wasn’t taking many hits, it made more sense for our mutual survival if she took an extra health increase. Sometimes we would even barter, ‘you can have all these stat gems but at the shop you have to buy me a present’. This also helped to close the skill gap between us without the embarrassment of enabling a handicap option that you might see in other games.
Leave a Reply