PAX West 2018: ‘With Friends Like These’ Is Weird, Adorable, and Super Cooperative

I’ve just barely begun to walk the expansive show floor at this year’s PAX West (my first time at the expo, aside from that time I borrowed a badge for like 30 minutes), and it’s freaking tough not to be immediately overwhelmed.

There are incredible, unreleased games everywhere. As far as the eye can see, in absolutely any direction, you’ll see a myriad of titles that you’ve never heard of that look like the coolest things that have ever existed in your entire freaking life.

Seriously, this place is amazing, and I’m so excited to peruse the floor, to play more games, and to buy buy buy buy buy (or pre-order).

But today, I fell in love with a beautiful, simple, weird co-op game called With Friends Like These.

The game comes from Shy Kids Club (which I accidentally labelled as simply Shy Kids Games in my still to come audio interview, so apologies for that), the husband and wife duo of Nicole Lawson and Craig Brown from Canberra, Australia. With Friends Like These is set to be their first retail release after finding some success with game jams in the past, and I think that it’s pretty clear that they’ve come across something special with the mechanics at work here.

See, With Friends Like These is a co-op title (there is also single player, so if you’re all alone, don’t worry) where two players control parts of the same ship. One player can move the ship, while the other controls the ship’s single gun. It sounds really simple, but can get complicated really quickly, as who is doing what changes depending on whether the ship is in the air, or in the water.

To start, it’s pretty hard to get used to. In many instances I had just been controlling the ship, and it took way too freaking long for me to figure out that this was no longer the case. As time goes on, however, your brain gets used to it, and you begin to better anticipate and prepare for just when these switches will happen. The game does a phenomenal job of forcing verbal communication between you and your gaming partner, as timing is crucial – near the end of our demo, a giant, angry monster was chasing us and frequently shooting different coloured projectiles (one player is blue, one is pink, and each can only destroy enemies or projectiles of their respective colour), we had to time just when our controls would switch (again, the players have no control over this, it happens automatically when you switch between moving through water and air) so that we could keep our momentum, and so that the player who would become the gun could immediately shoot the already incoming projectiles.

I just made it sound way more complicated than it is. As I said, after a few minutes of play, you’ll get used to the mechanics, and it becomes all about timing, teamwork, and communication, and it’s so much fun.

Naturally, it’s beautiful too. Nicole does all of the gorgeous art for the title, and Craig says that she’s pretty weird, so, for instance, in an area that needed a gate, she added a slug that was vomiting rainbows instead. Even during the short demo, there were a lot of interesting, hilarious moments that you could easily miss if you weren’t paying attention.

Also, that story tho. Here’s the synopsis:

Everyone on your home planet is super bored and over worked! So you and your bestie have decide to take everyone on a trip to crazy time planet where everyone can let off some steam. Unfortunately, things go wrong and you crash into Super Chill world, your friends don’t realise they’re on the wrong planet and start to cause chaos. It’s up to you to collect up all your friends before they cause too much damage and drive the super chill residents insane.

Super Chill planet is made up of water and air floating around everywhere. Players have to work together to navigate their way around and find their crazy friends. While the blue player flies the ship in water, the pink player will zap pink ‘bullets’ that teleport your friends back to the bus. When the ship flies into air, the roles will swap, the pink player will then fly and the blue player will zap blue bullets. You also have to match the colour bullets to the colour of your friends eyes.

Yeah. I love it (and you can hear me gushing over it on today’s Geekscape Games episode).

With Friends Like These will launch in 2019 for PC and Switch. Take a look at the trailer below, and be sure to let us know what you think! Look for my audio interview with Craig on Geekscape Games later this week!