Last year’s explosion of ‘friendslop’ games inspired by Peak’s phenomenal success may be a recession indicator, but I’m still here for it: I love seeing indie developers focusing on small, cheap, creative games built around the idea of hanging with the pals. But the game industry’s tendency to pile onto a promising trend does mean that if you go looking for a new co-op game on Steam, the selection is likely to be dominated by what’s been most successful in the last couple years. Lo-fi 3D games riffing on Peak; survival crafting; roguelike mechanics slapped onto anything from gambling to cowboys to Dark Souls.
I’ve got nothing against those games, but they don’t get me gassed up the way finding a purer—and if I’m being totally honest, more old-fashioned—form of Discord hangout game does: the linear, 7/10 co-op first-person shooter.
That was exactly the description that crossed my mind when I played Turok: Origins at Summer Game Fest last week. It may sound like damning with faint praise, but I truly mean it as a compliment.
The prequel to the dino-shooting ’90s FPS is a three-player co-op game that lets you switch between first- and third-person at will; I played two missions and shot a whole bunch of both dinosaurs and aliens, frequently popping off abilities that launched volleys of magic missiles or beam attacks at them instead of bullets. It wasn’t until we fought the boss of the second mission that I figured out how the health system worked, because up to that point I’d mostly been mashing buttons, watching shit explode, and chatting with one of the game’s developers over a headset mic that was trying valiantly to filter out a whole lot of background noise.
There’s something reassuring in the confidence of a game that knows exactly what it is and executes on what it promises with workmanlike precision. Call it the opposite of eurojank, where you admire the ambition of a game reaching for more than it can really deliver on. Turok: Origins, at least from the bit I played, isn’t attempting to tell a nuanced story (though there is one) or deliver the most amazing-feeling FPS guns you’ve ever used (though they feel pretty good!). It’s also, crucially, not built around the lure of keeping you playing forever with procedurally generated guns or a roguelite progression system.
I think it might be my perfect Discord hangout game.
I should probably be clear about what exactly I mean by “Discord hangout game.” The definition will naturally vary depending on the size of your Discord group, of course, and how much time you have to play games. To me, there are a few key characteristics:
- Co-op support for 3-5 players
- Story should be minimal, but it can still be valuable for creating structure and giving co-op sessions a sense of accomplishment
- A Discord hangout game should be playable while only half paying attention the majority of the time
- You should only have to really lock in 10-20% of the time; the rest of the play session should allow for idle chit chat
- One player being less engaged than the rest of the group, or more engaged than the rest of the group, will not spoil the experience for everyone
All of these factors are important, but I think the last one especially is. Overcooked, for example, is not a very good hangout game because one player can easily ruin the whole vibe by either taking it too seriously or not doing their part.
As PC Gamer’s Morgan Park pointed out to me when we were discussing our shared love of co-op shooters, one of many reasons “friendslop” feels like a poor descriptor for games like Peak is that they’re actually fairly demanding of the player. You can goof off in Peak and have fun without taking it seriously, but to succeed you do need to be pretty engaged. The climbing stamina system demands patience, caution and good timing; one or two falls and you’re almost certainly dead. Peak’s use of proximity voice chat is a fantastic design touch, but further pushes it out of casual hangout game territory for me. It’s hard to chat with a friend about what they made for dinner or what’s going on with their job when you wander out of earshot and have to break off the conversation.
This isn’t a criticism of those types of games—it just means they’re at their best with a degree of attention I don’t think is always ideal for a casual Wednesday night Discord hangout when we’re all kinda tired but want to play a game together. Similarly, I find roguelites and survival games often aren’t the best fit for a small Discord server that has a busy-adults-with-many-important-things-to-do vibe: the promise of infinite possibility and hundreds of hours of game is often not that appealing.
A game like Turok, on the other hand, with set missions, just enough story to give each one a bit of flavor, and a class system where we can each specialize in a role and unlock more gear as we go? The promise that we can replay levels on harder difficulties with our souped-up gear if we want, but we could also just finish the game and be satisfied instead of just kinda trailing off when someone gets busy for a few days?
In a different context, I might have more gripes about Turok: Origins—that its moving or shooting could use a bit more friction, that objectives like “enter this arena and blow up these five glowing plants” aren’t exactly the most engaging. But while playing it I was mostly having a good time, because nothing in the game got in the way of having a fun chat while the shooting lit up the “bad guys go boom” bit of my lizard brain.
It’s flashy. It moves fast. A few times I threw down a shield to help my teammates; most of the time we were each just running around blastin’. You can do some cool finishing moves on the dinosaurs that are guaranteed to elicit some hooting and also hollering in the chat.
I don’t particularly like the phrase “turn your brain off” as it’s often applied to the dumbest big-budget games or Hollywood blockbusters, because the best examples of either form manage to be engaging or novel in some way that puts them a cut above the average. I haven’t played enough of Turok: Origins to say exactly how it will land, but playing it made me appreciate the art required of making a game that demands precisely enough from its players. I mean, just imagine trying to hold a conversation while playing Doom Eternal. Ridiculous!
But between Space Marine 2’s class-based mission system and what I’ve played at Turok: Origins, I think Saber Interactive has found a very welcome niche in making shooters that know when to make you focus on surviving for the next 30 seconds, and are otherwise content to let you blab about your latest sourdough success. I’m blessed that both a legendary line of dinosaur hunters and King Arthur have my back.
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