Have you played Deep Rock Galactic? It’s a wonderful games where you play a dwarf mining things, fighting off bugs while you do it. You play in a group of up to 4 people trying to complete your objectives together.

I find it really hard to explain what makes it great, so you’ll just have to trust it’s avid fan base!

If you and your partner enjoy RPG’s, I highly recommend Divinity: Original Sin (and Divinity: Original Sin 2, though we haven’t finished that one yet). Very story-driven, the tactical combat is a blast when you get into strategizing and collaborating, and there are all sorts of non-combat shenanigans you can get up to as well (the second even more so than the first).

Dont Starve Together and Overcooked are my jam with wife :3

You probably played it already, but if you didn’t, Portal 2 has a Co-op campaign and it’s really good.

Edit: I opened my steam library for more games and and saw that apparently an unofficial mod Portal reloaded had a co-op update if you already played the original. Anyway here’s some more games.

Battleblock theater: a co-op puzzle platformer. It has a bit of a party game vibe with it’s humour and ability to mess with your friends, but it has a story.

Don’t starve together: a 2d survival game with an interesting drawn style.

FEAR 3: a horror FPS.

Payday 2: a co-op FPS where you rob banks (and other places).

I’m a bit surprised by your premise, games with local co-op have certainly almost disappeared entirely, but I haven’t noticed a trend in online co-op. Some good ones off-hand (that haven’t been mentioned). These are in descending order if my personal playtime as a rough proxy for how good I think they are.

• Remnant
• Wasteland 3
• Outriders
• Gloomhaven
• Risk of Rain 2
• Warhammer Vermintide 2
• Monster Hunter World
• Left 4 Dead series
• Back 4 Blood
• Borderlands series
• Magicka
• Star Wars the Old Republic
• Helldivers
• Barony
• Barotrauma
• Gods Trigger
• Action Squad
• Aragami 1,2
• Evil West

Deep Rock Galactic

Use the Local Co-Op tag on Steam and you can filter them down pretty well. I played through these with my wife. They were a ton of fun. I put an asterisks beside my favorites.
Darksiders Genesis*
It Takes Two*
Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light (with the Legacy of Kain DLC)*
Secret of Mana Remake*
Unravel 2
Full Metal Furies*
Castle Crashers*

These are good too.

Helldivers*
Road Redemption
Rampage Knights
Broforce
Streets of Rage 4
Huntdown*
Any WORMS game, WMD is great.
Overcooked
Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime*
Speedrunners
Shadowgrounds

The Trine series is a fun 1-3 player game with a nice story and a few puzzles to play trough.

If you want to explore and do story on the side i can also always recommend Guild Wars 2. Base game is f2p so worthy of a look IMO.

We recommend V Rising. It’s an ARPG (Diablo-like), but with big focus on base building.

You mine, you craft, you build a cool looking goth castle, and then you hunt enemies or bosses using your upgraded weapon and new skills. It’s very fun. You can spin up a local server and modify your own server/game rules to increase progress speed (as some features are designed for a 24/7 server, and your game only advances when it’s running, so some speedups are necessary)

Thank you all so, so, so much for your responses! These are giving me so many great ideas! I’m feeling really hopeful right now and am excited to share these games with my friends and with my partner! The number of responses I’ve gotten is amazing! I’m really excited to start diving into these games! I’m happy to see so many people out there feel similarly to me as well. Maybe there’ll be a resurgence in these kinds of games :)

Again, thank you all so much!

When I started to read your post I was going to reply with ItTakes Two, but then I saw you already played it. IMO that is the best co-op game ever. A little bit of everything, amazing graphics, gameplay, music. I only wish I found something close to it.

My friend and I played We Were Here Forever. Not an action game whatsoever. Graphics were meh. Story ok. The challenges were fun but difficult. If you are looking for a “thinking/puzzle” co-op that requires good communication, you may want to give it a try.

Following this post to see other comments, as I would love to try out a good co-op as well.

Here are some rough categories and hours included.

Builder / Survival

Sounded like you were not that interested in this genre but they can be fun co-op experiences.

• Terraria (850 hours) - Two of my friends I have done two clean slate full play-throughs of this game.
• Core Keeper (77 hours) - Also played through the content of this game with same 2 friends.
• Valheim (344 hours) - Did a co-op play through with a friend on this one. Might do it again with Mistlands or with other updates.

Boss Encounters / Building

• V Rising (79 hours)

Played through V Rising with a friend, co-op pve, and it was a blast. We really enjoyed the different boss battles. We are going to revisit this one soon as they dropped / are dropping new content.

Exploration / Melee Combat / Story

• Dying Light 2 (87 hours)

Enjoyed playing Dying Light 2 with a friend, playing the game turned out to a mix of playing solo and playing co-op.

Platformer

• Trine

Fox mentioned this and I’ll add it as well. Fun co-op platformer with some fun story telling aspects.

MMO

• Guildwars 2

Fox also mentioned GW2 in the thread. There is a ridiculous amount of content in this game with no subscription required. Combat feedback/force has always felt weak imo but there is a massive world to explore and jumpy puzzles if you are into that (love them).

More story focused co-op

Also watching this thread as I’m curious what shows up. I haven’t played many games in this area on PC.