Call your friends over and hand them that chewed up bootleg controller, the Steam Couch Co-Op Fest is here! Featuring heaps of multiplayer titles and great discounts, there has never been a better time to game with your friends.
Couch co-op is a dying practice in gaming, but some indie developers are fighting to kept it alive, which is why we wanted to highlight their work and also recommend you a few titles worth trying out.
Below you can find our selection of five games with great co-op multiplayer, who are also currently on sale:
Crawl
Starting off our list we have Crawl, an indie game that never saw a lot of mainstream attention, despite being beloved by the few who played it.
In Crawl, four players are put in the shoes of a group of deceased adventurers, who constantly fight to take over one mortal body. The game is a constant push and pull between four ghosts to possess an adventurer and escape the haunted dungeon.
After every stage, the player controlling the adventurer gets to purchase items and spells on a shop, while the ghosts get to upgrade their monsters by moving through different evolution chains, going from harmless fish to archdemons. Crawl is not only a fantastic roguelike but also an incredibly fun party game, making it a great couch co-op experience.
Crawl is available on Steam for $2.99 with an 80% discount
Rabbit and Steel
Rabbit and Steel is a bullet hell boss rush game that accurately simulates an MMORPG’s endgame raiding experience, down to the positionals, rotations, visual clutter, and insane mechanical overlaps.
Created by solo developer mino_dev, Rabbit and Steel is a 2D roguelike with a heavy emphasis on bullet hell gameplay. The game describes itself as a raiding roguelike, and what that means is that battles follow the structure of a traditional MMORPG’s raid.
Rabbit and Steel is possibly my favorite indie game released in 2024, fully committing to its premise and accurately simulating one of my favorite genres in a tight and bite-sized format. It is also much easier to convince your friends to play a short roguelike than to spend a couple hundred hours leveling up their character in an MMORPG.
Rabbit and Steel is available on Steam for $10.49 with a 30% discount.
Risk of Rain Returns
Returns serves as a remake for the certified classic 2013 hit indie title Risk of Rain, which adds a lot of features and content from Risk of Rain 2, as well as fixing the notoriously unreliable multiplayer mode that plagued the game’s original release.
The chaotic roguelike structure that Risk of Rain follows lends itself to incredibly fun multiplayer experiences, and the timer that constantly increases the game’s difficulty only adds to that sense of chaos.
You really can’t go wrong with any of the Risk of Rain games, as each of them provide different but equally polished roguelike experiences to those who want some co-op fun with their friends.
Risk of Rain Returns is available on Steam for $11.24 with a 25% discount. You can also grab the game for $10 alongside five other titles as part of Humble’s Co-Op Adventures Bundle.
Astral Ascent
Astral Ascent is a hyper-fast hack-and-slash roguelike where players move through combat rooms and fully customize their abilities to take on powerful bosses that represent the 12 Zodiac signs.
The game has recently gotten its first character DLC, which introduces the mysterious prisoner Yamat, and it set to receive a 2.0 update with a staggering amount of features later in April of this year, making this the best time to get familiar with it before a massive content drop.
Developers Hibernian Workshop have gone above and beyond to make sure players can get together with their friends and experience Astral Ascent through local co-op, Steam’s Remote Play Together feature, and Parsec for online play, making it easy for players to move through it in whatever way they see fit.
Astral Ascent is available on Steam for $14.99 with a 40% discount.
Castle Crashers
The Behemoth’s work is legendary, as they have not only paved the way for indie gaming on consoles, but have also given so much post-launch support to their titles that it makes me want to create another Steam account just so I can buy them again.
Castle Crashers is one of the most fun multiplayer games out there, featuring a lengthy and hilarious story campaign, as well as many other game modes that range from PvP arena fights to board games.
This is the perfect time to either purchase or jump back into Castle Crashers, not only due to its massive discount, but also because of the complete art rework the game will go through soon, adding new visuals to the entire cast and enemies, as well as new features like character creation. Go buy Castle Crashers, and if you already have it, go buy it for someone else.
Castle Crashers is available on Steam for $1.49 with a 90% discount.
And that’s it for our coverage of the Steam Couch Co-Op fest. You can check out the entire event right here, which is filled with sales and demos for upcoming multiplayer games. Make sure to move fast, though, since the event is only lasting until February 17, 2025.
