Couch Two Player exists because reviews of cooperative games are almost always written by one person playing alone. This page explains how we test instead, what the mismatched session is, and what we will not do.
Online cooperative play and same-room cooperative play are different activities that happen to share a menu option. Online, you communicate by voice and see only your own view. In one room you see each other, you hear tone rather than compressed audio, and — crucially — you share one display, which changes almost every design consideration that matters.
A game can be superb online and unusable on a sofa. Split-screen interface text is the most common failure, followed closely by saves belonging exclusively to player one and cameras that only follow one character. None of these are visible to a solo reviewer, and all of them end an evening.
One machine, one 55-inch television at a measured two and a half metres, four controllers of different makes, and a sofa. It is deliberately an ordinary living room rather than a test bench, because the failures we are looking for only appear in ordinary living rooms.
We do not use a monitor at desk distance for any of this. Text that is legible at sixty centimetres is frequently unreadable at two and a half metres, and reviewing on a desk is precisely how the split-screen legibility problem stays invisible.
Both reviewers play, both reasonably competent at the genre. This establishes what the game is like when it works, and gives us the dispute baseline.
One confident player, one who plays very little. Almost every real living room looks like this, and it is where most cooperative designs quietly fail.
We repeat the mismatched session with the seats reversed. Asymmetric games in particular hide their problems until you have sat in the other chair.
Copies needed, machines needed, whose profile saves, whether text is readable from the sofa, whether a round can be paused, and whether a session can end cleanly.
Two people who share a living room and have spent years discovering that the store page phrase "local co-op" covers an enormous range of quality. We do not publish names, biographies or any route for correspondence, because none of it improves a review and it invites messages we have no way to handle properly.
What we do disclose in each review is which of us sat in which seat, how many hours each of us logged, and whether either of us plays the genre regularly. In a site built on the difference between two players, that information is the relevant kind.
Factual errors — a copy requirement, a save behaviour, a count — are corrected in place with a note on the page and the original figure left visible. Scores change only when a patch alters something we tested, which has happened once and is recorded on the scoring page.
Online-only cooperative games, games requiring three or more copies, and anything that cannot be played by two people in one room. All three are perfectly reasonable designs and all three are outside what this site is for.
