My partner and I occasionally play games together, but they pretty much only play word puzzle games on their own. I'm not very good at word games though, and they don't have very good spatial skills, so we frequently find ourselves mismatched. We have a switch and a single decent gaming pc, and a pretty old laptop.
The biggest hit for us has been Baba is You because it is slow paced, and combines words and logic and spatial reasoning. Our biggest problem was that its not actually coop, so we would just alternate who played, which can disengage the other person. My partner also thought its aesthetic is cute.
Our next positive example is probably Snipperclips is also a pretty slow paced puzzler, is mostly spatial skills, but we could play at the same time. They also liked how interactive the avatars are, and particularly snipping my avatar up.
The first miss is overcooked, it was a bit too chaotic, and my partner felt a little lost and uncoordinated. They don't remember it super well, so we might retry this one at some point if they feel more at home playing video games.
The other miss is Mario Kart, which they liked when we played with 4 player, but not just the 2 of us. I'm significantly better at Mario Kart, and they are pretty competitive. If they get more into games they might be willing to put in some time improving, but not so much right now.
Our worst miss was probably Tricky Towers, I'm decently good at regular Tetris, so I can do okay out of the box at physics based Tetris, but there was too much happening to fast for my partner. Combine that with it the competitive aspect and they didn't enjoy this one at all.
The games they most fondly remember from childhood are Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero, though we have downstairs neighbors under part of our apartment and no dance pad or guitars, SSX Tricky, and the Lord of the Rings movie tie in games.
They think they'd enjoy a game that does movement as input like ddr or guitar hero but is maybe less bouncy, and are open to action games, or games with a story, but they should be easier to control and not be too chaotic. Cute aesthetics and cats are a plus.
Thanks!
Edit: Everybody gave great recommendations! We picked up It takes two and pizza possum. Just finished the first chapter of it takes two and we had a blast, and I might even be able to get another game night in this weekend if we can be on top of chores. I'll keep checking in this thread for more ideas for future games to try! Thanks again!
My partner and I like to play the Lego games together. Lego Star Wars (2005ish) was a favorite, but the newer ones are fun too.
I second the Lego games. Although the older ones (Complete Saga) & Lego Indiana Jones were annoying to play COOP because there's no split screen.
But Lego Star Wars Clonewars has split screen so you don't get in the way of each other. I haven't actually played other newer Lego games but I assume they will have split screen as well.
In our world, the lack of split screen was a feature. It was less co-op as in play together, and more like play as a team. We enjoy fighting about meaningless stuff like whether to collect studs or whether to hurry along. I'd imagine if I tried playing with a sibling, there would be blood.
For me I just found it annoying that whenever we wanted to go in different directions one player would end up getting dragged back by the camera border. So many failed jumps...
But that's fair, if someone thinks that being able to get in the way of each other and being forced to cooperate better due to it adds to their enjoyment of the game then playing the games without split screen could be preferable.
I just never considered that possibility.