Over the past few years, I have developed a friendship through gaming that I’ve only dreamed of ever having. I’m not talking about an online friendship where we scream at each other and laugh in-between matches, but rather a direct friendship in which we get together, in person, and game. It all started a few years ago when we, two guys and me, would go to the movies and make a quick stop at GameStop beforehand. A few weeks after Smash Bros had been released, we were strolling through GameStop, and we all gathered around a copy of Smash Bros. With me being the only person in the friend group to own a Wii U, peer pressure set in, and I went home with a copy of Smash Bros that night. We put hours into that game, and we’ve all had our fair share of winning, gloating, and losing. Flash forward a year, and the magic of Smash Bros was starting to bore us. We wanted something new to “spice up” when we hangout.

We moved onto other co-op games from there. We adventured with some Super Mario 3D World, toyed around with TowerFall Ascension, and spent a few nights playing Mario Kart 8. However, nothing seemed to hit the spot like we wanted it to. So, our late nights of hanging out and gaming flatlined, and we started hanging out less and doing different things when we did hang out.

But then, a new game was released that caught our attention, and it reignited a spark inside of all of us. Until Dawn had been out for about a week, and it had caught the attention of all of us. We hadn’t paid much attention to it before its release, and with all of the positive buzz surrounding its release, we were interested in it. I’m personally not a fan of anything in the horror genre in the slightest, so although it was a game I was super interested, I didn’t want to play it by myself. Since my friends were interested in it, I decided to seize the moment and rope them into playing it as a group. So, Labor Day weekend of 2015, we purchased Until Dawn and started playing through it. Over a span of three nights, we managed to play through the game.

That weekend was one of my favorite weekends of all time, and it is one of my greatest gaming memories. Although Until Dawn is a single player game, we were all involved with making decisions and arguing about why we thought we should make certain decisions. One of us would be playing, and the other two would weigh in on what they thought was the right decision to make. Often times the controller would get passed to a new person due to the original player being too afraid to carry on, or due to the spectators getting upset at certain decisions being made by the person playing. The first scenario came from tense moments, when you knew something bad or terrifying was about to happen. At one point, my friend even dropped the controller and ran after a horrifying, unexpected jump scare. The second scenario often resulted in yelling and the controller being ripped out of someone’s hands because the person playing wasn’t honest with Ashley about Chris’s true feelings. This was the most fun we had had in a long time.

So with this experience under our belt, we started searching for more games similar to Until Dawn. We wanted games that had a story they wanted to tell, and a game that we could experience together instead of individually. So we started searching, and we found some great choices. First, we played through Life Is Strange, where we felt we were just chilling and having a great time until the last episode hit us like a train and completely stunned us with the new direction of the game. Then we played through Firewatch, where we roamed the game’s beautiful vistas and got caught completely caught off guard by its one and only jump scare. We had a great time experiencing Firewatch’s story together, and I honestly don’t think I would have liked that game as much if I wouldn’t have played it with my best friends. And most recently, we played through Oxenfree together. Oxenfree gave us a ride we weren’t expecting, and charmed us in a way that no other game had up to that point. If it wasn’t for my best friends, I don’t know if I would’ve played through Oxenfree three times and established the love I have for that game.

Playing through these games that are all about their story and exploring the world, it’s something that we highly enjoy doing together. It’s our favorite way to game now. In fact, I waited to play through Heavy Rain until I had time to play it with them over winter break. Playing through these story-driven games and getting to make choices together is one of our favorite ways to spend time together.

The moral of the story is; I believe this is the new couch co-op. With a fluctuation of local multiplayer games over the past few years, I believe these story driven games can consistently be counted on to deliver fun adventures for friends to experience together, and that they can be considered the new local multiplayer games.