GAMES LIKE IT TAKES TWO: THE BEST CO-OP ADVENTURES

My partner and I finished It Takes Two in three sittings. We stayed up way too late on that second night because the game kept doing something new every twenty minutes and neither of us wanted to be the one to say "okay, let's stop." That's the thing about It Takes Two. It doesn't just give you one good mechanic and ride it for eight hours. It gives you thirty mechanics and throws each one away before you get bored. One level you're shooting nails into walls while the other person swings between them. The next you're riding on the back of a fish through a snow globe. The variety is relentless and somehow none of it feels half-baked.

So what do you play after that? I've been chasing that same feeling in co-op games for a while now, and the honest answer is that nothing replicates It Takes Two exactly. Josef Fares and Hazelight Studios made something pretty singular. But different games capture different pieces of what makes it special, and some of them are fantastic in their own right. If you want a broader sweep across the genre, the best co-op games on Steam list covers a wider net than this one does.

A Way Out

The obvious starting point. A Way Out is Hazelight's previous game, directed by the same Josef Fares who stood on stage at the Game Awards and told the audience he had a lot to say. It's a mandatory co-op game about two guys breaking out of prison, and it was doing the split-screen-at-all-times thing before It Takes Two refined it.

A Way Out is rougher. The gameplay sections are simpler, the moment-to-moment mechanics don't rotate as aggressively, and some sequences lean hard on quick-time events. But the story is better. Like, genuinely better. The two protagonists, Leo and Vincent, have real chemistry and the narrative goes places I didn't expect. Without spoiling the ending, I'll just say that Fares understands how to use the co-op format as a storytelling tool in ways that most developers haven't even considered.

If you liked the "playing through a story together" aspect of It Takes Two more than the platforming, A Way Out is the better game. The production values hold up. The pacing is tight. And it does something in its final act that I'm still thinking about years later.

Sackboy: A Big Adventure

This one surprised me. I went in expecting a cute little platformer for kids and got a legitimately excellent co-op game with smart level design and some genuinely tricky sections. Sackboy takes the LittleBigPlanet aesthetic and strips away the creation tools in favor of a focused, handcrafted campaign. Every level is built around a specific gimmick, which is where the It Takes Two comparison kicks in.

The co-op puzzles require real coordination. You're picking each other up, throwing each other across gaps, standing on switches at the right time. It's not as mechanically inventive as It Takes Two, but Sumo Digital clearly understood that the fun comes from players needing each other, not just existing in the same space. The difficulty curve is gentle enough that you can play with someone who doesn't game much, but there are optional challenge levels that will test anyone.

The soundtrack is ridiculous in the best way. There are levels synced to licensed music where the platforms and obstacles pulse with the beat. It's pure joy.

Unravel Two

Coldwood Interactive figured out something clever with Unravel Two. You and your co-op partner are two tiny yarn characters tethered together by a shared thread. That thread is everything. You use it to swing, to create bridges, to pull each other up ledges, to solve physics puzzles. The constraint of being physically connected forces every puzzle to be genuinely cooperative. You can't just split up and do your own thing because the rope runs out.

The movement feels great. Swinging through environments has a satisfying weight to it, and the physics of the yarn connection create moments where you're both trying to figure out the exact right positioning to make a jump work. It's a shorter game, maybe six hours, and the story is told entirely without dialogue through background environmental storytelling. Some of the imagery is striking. A lot of it is melancholy.

Unravel Two captures the "we're connected and need to work together" feeling better than almost anything else on this list. It doesn't have the variety of It Takes Two, but it goes deeper on its one core idea.

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons

This is a weird recommendation because it's single player. One person controls both brothers simultaneously, one with each analog stick. But it belongs here because it was made by Josef Fares before he founded Hazelight. You can see the DNA of everything he'd later do in It Takes Two and A Way Out. The idea that two characters need each other, that cooperation is the mechanic, that the relationship between the players (or in this case, the player's two hands) is the game.

Brothers is short, around three hours, and it does something with its control scheme near the end that I still think is one of the most powerful moments in gaming. I can't say more without spoiling it. Just play it. If you loved It Takes Two because of how Fares thinks about game design, Brothers is where all of that started.

Phogs

Two players each control one end of a stretchy two-headed dog. That's the pitch. That's the whole game. And it works way better than it should.

Phogs is silly in a way that It Takes Two sometimes is but commits to fully. Each head can bite and grab things, and puzzles involve stretching your shared dog body across gaps, using one head as an anchor while the other reaches for something, or biting down on a hose while the other head sprays water. The puzzles aren't hard. This is not a game that's going to challenge experienced players. But it's warm and funny and the act of coordinating two ends of one dog creates constant low-stakes comedy.

If you want something to play with a partner or friend who isn't super into games, Phogs is a great pick. The vibes are immaculate and the difficulty is forgiving without being boring.

Moving Out

A physics-based moving simulator where you and your co-op partners are furniture movers clearing out houses, offices, and increasingly absurd locations under a time limit. Grab the couch, throw it in the truck, go back for the fridge, accidentally break a window, throw the fridge through the broken window because it's faster.

Moving Out doesn't have the story or the mechanical variety of It Takes Two, but it absolutely nails the "screaming at your friends while trying to coordinate" energy. The physics are intentionally loose, which means furniture gets stuck in doorways, lamps shatter against walls, and someone inevitably throws a box off a cliff. The chaos is the content. Each level introduces new wrinkles: slippery floors, conveyor belts, ghosts, trampolines. It escalates beautifully.

This is one of the best games for four players if you can get a group together. Two players works fine too, but the carnage scales with headcount.

Overcooked and Overcooked 2

I know Overcooked is more "cooperative chaos" than "cooperative adventure," but the energy is similar enough to deserve a mention. You're running a kitchen together, chopping ingredients, cooking, plating, serving customers, and washing dishes while the kitchen itself tries to sabotage you. Floors move, counters split apart, rats steal your food.

Overcooked 2 is the better game because it adds throwing, which means you can yell "catch" and hurl a tomato across the kitchen to your partner. The difficulty gets vicious in later levels. I've seen couples nearly break up over Overcooked, which says something about the intensity of its cooperative demands. It's the perfect test of whether you and your co-op partner can actually communicate under pressure.

The connection to It Takes Two is about energy, not mechanics. Both games make cooperation feel urgent and fun. Both games are designed so that you need each other and can't just do your own thing in parallel. That design philosophy matters more than genre.

KeyWe

Two kiwi birds running a post office. One bird hits the stamps, the other types the addresses, both of you are frantically hopping across an oversized desk trying to process mail before the timer runs out. KeyWe is adorable and surprisingly hectic. The birds can't pick things up with their hands because they don't have hands. They headbutt things and grab stuff with their beaks, which makes every simple action a tiny comedy of errors.

The game is short and probably won't blow your mind, but it fills a very specific niche. If you want something cooperative, cute, and low-commitment for an afternoon, KeyWe delivers. The seasonal events and different types of mail keep the core loop from getting stale, though I'll admit the novelty does wear off faster than something with more mechanical depth.

Pode

A puzzle game where a fallen star and a rock work together to get the star back to the sky. One character makes plants grow, the other activates stone mechanisms. Pode is Norwegian and it feels Norwegian. The art style is clean and geometric, the music is gentle, the pace is meditative. There are no enemies, no timers, no fail states.

Pode is the game on this list for people who liked the quiet, pretty moments in It Takes Two. The garden level, the calmer platforming sections. If you want a co-op game you can play while relaxed instead of while screaming, Pode is exactly that. The puzzles are satisfying without being stressful, and watching the environments bloom and light up as you solve them is genuinely lovely.

It's on the shorter side, around five to six hours, and it originally came out on Switch before making its way to other platforms. Don't sleep on it.

Haven

Haven is a co-op RPG about a couple who escaped to an uninhabited planet to be together. You glide across the landscape, cook meals, fight creatures, and maintain your relationship. The co-op element is woven into everything. Combat requires syncing your attacks, cooking is a shared activity, and the dialogue changes based on decisions both players make.

What Haven gets right is the relationship. Most co-op games are about two people working toward a goal. Haven is about two people being together, and the gameplay supports that. It's slower than It Takes Two and the combat isn't the main draw. The main draw is the feeling of sharing a quiet life on an alien world with someone you care about. It's a date night game in the best sense.

The art direction is gorgeous. Bright colors, flowing movement, a soundtrack that makes you want to lie on the floor and stare at the ceiling. Haven isn't for everyone, especially if you want constant action, but it captures a mood that nothing else on this list even attempts.

What makes It Takes Two so hard to match

I keep coming back to the same thought. It Takes Two works because Hazelight treated co-op as the entire design philosophy, not a feature bolted onto a single-player game. Every puzzle, every mechanic, every boss fight was built from scratch for two players. Most studios can't afford to do that. Most publishers wouldn't fund it. You're essentially halving your potential audience by requiring two players. Fares convinced EA to let him make a mandatory co-op game with a new mechanic every level and somehow the whole thing shipped with the polish of a first-party title.

The games on this list all capture a piece of what makes It Takes Two special. A Way Out has the narrative ambition. Unravel Two has the connected-by-a-thread cooperation. Overcooked has the frantic coordination. Pode has the beauty. Haven has the relationship. Brothers has the Fares design sensibility. None of them are It Takes Two, but all of them understand that the best co-op games are the ones where you can't play alone and don't want to.

Grab a friend. Pick one. Start playing.