Pound for pound February has gotta be one of the worst months of the year. The excitement of holidays is past us, the shine of the new year has already faded as we accelerate into global collapse, and it’s been below freezing for the better part of two weeks where I live. The once idyllic winter wonderland has grown ugly. Untouched, pure snow has been replaced with hard ice and dirty slush, and as it melts away it reveals the mountains of dog shit that people covered up because they were too cold and lazy to pick it up during the -7 degree nights.
Existence is pain in February, and it has taken every ounce of energy I have to exist as a functioning member of society. I consider myself an extrovert at heart, and social interaction heals my bitter heart, like a warm cup of potato leek soup on a chilly, chilly day. But going outside hurts the body at best, and is downright perilous at worst. So, as always, I turn to video games to be my soothing balm, and no other genre has scratched my itch for genuine human interaction than the emerging “friendslop” genre.
Friendslop started as a derogatory signifier from the most insufferable parts of the internet where people deemed a certain category of games centered around the cooperative gameplay loop as low effort, but was quickly embraced. In short, friendslop games revolve around a few key designs. One, you gotta have friends to play ’em (no wonder this garnered the ire of 4chan chuds). Two, usually there is proximity based voice chat, meaning the more distance you have between you and the person you are playing with, the quieter you become (we’ll get more into this). And three, you are usually cooperating to achieve some kind of shared goal.
These feel distinct from your standard multiplayer games like Mario Kart or Minecraft, it’s hard to exactly pin down if you haven’t had hands on one of these titles. There’s a certain je nais se quois to friendslop, you just kind of know it when you’re playing it. And if this stuff is slop, then baby, I’ve got a front row seat to the trough.
My interest in this style of game started back in 2024, where I picked up the game Lethal Company. Lethal Company is a horror game that is still in early access where you and your friends work a job where you fly to planets, gather up scrap to sell back home, or die trying. And boy howdy do you die a lot. It’s a solo-dev project that hasn’t had a lot updated to it since its release, but I have high hopes that there is a 1.0 announcement around the corner with some new content, because I truly believe this game has the sauce.
At its core, friendslop appeals to me because of the emergent comedy that comes with playing with your friends and hearing them react to something but not seeing it yourself. When a shadowy bug man comes around the corner to snap your friend’s neck and you hear nothing but a cut off yelp followed by silence as you call out to your now dead buddy just kills me, man. Another aspect of it that appeals to me is learning the rules of the game and problem solving together. Lethal Company’s premise is simple. You all have a quota to hit, and you hit the quota. A lot of games emerging in this genre follow suit. It’s not the what of it all, but the how.
Lethal’s problem unlike others I will talk about is that it seems like the better you get at it, the less fun I have playing it. Once you figure out how to navigate the labyrinthine environments, and how to hoard wealth, the game starts to feel solved. Lethal is at its peak in the earliest hours, where you and your crew have no idea what is going on, stumbling scared in the dark until something comes along and wipes your whole crew in the most slapstick, panic-inducing way imaginable. I hope the silence between this games early-access release to the explosion of popularity that we are seeing within the genre comes with these answers. At the very least I think this is a remarkable game and the progenitor of many amazing titles since its inception.
Speaking of peak. Can we talk about Peak? I’ve been dying to talk about Peak. Released by Aggro Crab and Landfall last year, this game is nothing short of a masterpiece in my humble opinion. I wish I gave it more attention the year it came out because I think it would easily land a spot in my top ten of 2025. Peak’s beauty is entirely in its simplicity. You and three friends are scouts climbing a mountain. When you make it to the titular peak, you win. I just think Peak is a masterclass in design.
While making your way up the mountain in Peak, you and your fellow scouts have to monitor your energy meter. This meter is where I think the genius in Peak’s simple design really shines. This meter is your climbing stamina (how high you can climb a cliff side before your scout gives and you fall), your health, your hunger, your temperature, everything. In other resource management games something like this can feel very overwhelming. I can very easily picture a game in my head that takes this and displays it over multiple UI elements, cluttering the screen and overload the player.
Unlike other games in the genre, Peak only gets better the more you master the mechanics. Figuring out what forageables heal verses poison you feels good. Being able to bound up and down the mountain over certain tricky gaps feels good. Instead of the shine wearing off the more hours you put it, it polishes into something bright and shiny. To further sing its praises I’ve gone and actually played a bit of Peak by myself, just enjoying the vibes and mechanics without even participating in the “friendfarming” of it all.
On a humor level, Peak delivers in spades. Whether it is watching your friend just slip from a ledge out of their reach and hear their screams fade as they fall down the mountain or plotting out a course and getting sucker-punched by a tumbleweed, sending you and your buds into a pile of cacti, the punishments feel so good they are borderline masochistic. In other games in the genre when you die, you lose contact with your party, but in Peak you become a little ghost that haunts your party, continuing communication and chatting, still giving you a seat at the table instead of putting you in some kind of fun waiting room.
Between Peak sessions, my friend group and I have been trying a couple other handful of friendslop titles. R.E.P.O. proves to be an enjoyable ride, playing around more with the horror space that Lethal Company revels in. The loop in R.E.P.O. feels cleaner than Lethal, offering more rogue-lite hooks like buying upgrades between rounds, or a fun battle royale minigame at the end of every run where you fight your friends to the death to earn the title of “king of the losers.”
Where R.E.P.O. loses me a bit is the aesthetics of it all. I don’t know how to describe this other than this game feels tailored specifically to a younger generation than me. I find Lethal’s looks to be a highlight. Playing in this space that is a mix of SCP-Foundation and Event Horizon by way of MacGyver. R.E.P.O. feels like playing scary Cocomelon at times. Big boogeymen are undercut by eyerolling emojis, and the humor feels like it is trying to purposefully manufacture those viral, shortformed clips that are second nature to the friendslop genre.
Other than that I think the game is very cool! You work with friends in this very unique physics engine to carefully place valuables in your cart as you push it through haunted houses, scary labs, and dilapidated art museums (my favorite). You can pick up and throw your friends to reach higher spots, and each monster has a unique set of rules to learn and interact with to keep your run going. One of my favorites is a blind hunter that reacts only to sound, but as soon as you make a noise it whips around and shotgun blasts you and your friends in a hilarious manner.
I haven’t really put in enough hours into the game to develop any further thoughts about it, really. A lot of this is first impressions. On a design level I like how easy it is to start up a game in R.E.P.O. and I enjoy that it has the options to join random lobbies, so if you can’t gather up 3 of yours pals to play you can still dip your toes in and try it out if you’re feeling social.
Another first impression I want to shout out is a game that just dropped early 2026, YAPYAP. You and your friends are capricious little wizards that are tasked to vandalize environments as opposed to gathering loot, which is a really novel twist on the formula that friendsloppers have grown accustomed.
My feelings regarding YAPYAP are pretty much the exact opposite of R.E.P.O. There is a weirder learning curve to the prior as opposed to latter’s relatively newcomer friendly outlook. There is little to no tutorials in YAPYAP, as it rewards experimentation and discovery more than anything. The aesthetics are also sooooo good in this one. Your world is a psychedelic, low-poly romp. There are still tinges of horror throughout YAPYAP, but it’s way more focused on the weird, and the arcane.
Your main mode of engagement in YAPYAP is well, yapping. You go around ruining rival wizard castles by shouting out spells to cast them. Examples include yelling “Aero!” to fire a bolt of wind to knock things over, or yelling “Piss Yuk!” to shoot urine out of your wand to defile statues and paintings. While being little scamps you sometimes come up on little puzzles that reward you with cooler wands, and sometimes you come up on big monsters trying to stop you, like large suits of armor, or cubes of slime (pro-tip, try pissing on the slime for a surprise).
Sometimes the looks of YAPYAP get in its own way. The castles are dark and confusing, and at times just make you feel lost more than anything else. You can find torches and candles to help light your way, but the game would feel so much better if things were just a touch brighter. Also this game is pretty new, so I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of content (if any) they decide to add in.
I’d love a handful of more biomes to interact with because after a few hours of wandering very similar looking castle halls, everything kind of just feels samey. While we’re levying minor complaints, I wish there were more ways to interact with the monsters in this game. If you don’t have spells that deal damage you are mostly just helpless at later points in your session, just running from everything instead of engaging with this very cool world they’ve made.
One last thing I want to shout out is a game slated to come out later this year called Big Walk. This looks like everything I want out of this genre. It seems engaging, relaxing, funny, everything. You and your friends just go on a big walk, solving little puzzles, and playing in the space they’ve made for us.
On the horizon it seems like friendslop is absolutely here to stay, which just delights me to no end. There was a long stretch of time where the multiplayer landscape was dominated by more competitive video games. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for running the occasional set in Smash Bros, and with the newest update/overhaul of Overwatch, me and my spouse have been bit by the Blizzard bug once again. But…I don’t know, there is a part of me that feels like competitive games don’t cater to the type of gamer that I am anymore. I don’t seek to be better than my peers. I want to simply play with them, and that’s the beauty in friendslop. It reminds us that we’re here to collaborate and have fun on the way.
Big shout outs to my friends Emily, Brendan, and Greg, who have been with me along this journey every step of the way. We’ve made it a point to get together in these games at least once a week to have a laugh, beat a new challenge, and to simply exist with each other and have a good time. All my love in the world to you three, and I’ll see you all at the slop trough later.
Leave a Reply