Best Roguelike Games Designed Around Co-Op

Key Takeaways

• Cooperative play enhances the roguelike experience, making it more inviting & engaging for groups of friends.
• Ember Knights offers fast-paced combat, unique abilities, and great co-op potential for fun game nights.
• Ravenswatch and Gunfire Reborn are challenging yet rewarding co-op roguelike games with unique gameplay elements.

Roguelikes are fun enough on their own and have a lot of replayability, as that’s exactly what they are designed for. However, when friendly cooperation is added into the mix, the genre suddenly becomes a lot more inviting — and a lot more interesting.

There’s nothing quite like going through the same couple of stages with different builds and characters, and challenging the same bosses in different ways with a few friends to enjoy the ride alongside. Since roguelikes are created to be played again and again, they’re a good bet when a group of friends can’t find anything new they want to play, often serving as the de-facto online meet-up location to catch up and chat.

8 Ember Knight

Team-Based Action Roguelike

Inspired by classics like Hades and Dead Cells, Ember Knights takes a gander at the roguelike genre with all the charm of a pixel game and all the mechanics one would expect from a well-developed indie game. The game allows up to four player co-op, making it great for game nights and long sessions with friends.

The game features everything a roguelike lover could ever need: fast-paced combat, unique weapons, abilities, and relics, and engaging combat that is accentuated by a fairly simple but charming story.

7 Ravenswatch

The Witch Doctor Vibe

Ravenswatch is a beautiful game that focuses on combat as much as it does on aesthetics. The gloomy game embraces the emo look and runs with it, creating an identity as the cool older cousin with sick tattoos in the co-op roguelike world.

The game can be very punishing and requires players to work together and cover each other’s backs in order to win a run. Though the maps can feel a little generic, especially after playing on them dozens of times, the build variety is well-worth the time investment for players to explore.

6 Windblown

Dead Cell Dev’s New Project

Coming from the developers behind the indie darling, Dead Cells, Windblown is a co-op roguelike that is more similar to Hades than to its predecessor. The game features an isometric view, more fast-paced movement than seems healthy, and vibrant colors that give it a unique identity.

The co-op aspect of the game is especially well integrated, fully letting players enjoy the experience with a friend. The game is still in early access and lacks a lot of content that players might expect from the successor of Dead Cells, but there is surely more to come as the team develops the game further.

5 Roboquest

Robot FPS Roguelike

The inorganic brother of Gunfire Reborn, Roboquest sucks the player into a first-person shooter experience where they need to go against hordes of enemy robots as a moving hunk of metal themselves. The gun play in this game is quite fun, and the movement mechanics make the downtime between fights relatively enjoyable as well.

The game works well as a single-player experience but is designed to be played alongside a friend, or ‘brobot.’ Unfortunately, players can only play with one other player. Fortunately, it has public matchmaking, making it much more convenient to find a partner for your sci-fi journey.

4 Crab Champions

Rave Party Near The Ocean

What’s more roguelike than a crab with a gun? Four crabs with guns. Crab Champions is a game that isn’t afraid of having overpowered builds, and the power creep in the game can be ridiculous at times. However, that’s exactly what makes it so fun to play.

Created by a solo dev with a passion for crab-themed games, Crab Champions is a third-person shooter experience with a promise of pushing high-end pcs to their limits in later stages of runs. It has satisfying movement, it has plentiful weapon choices, and it has enough builds to keep a family busy for a couple of weeks.

3 Gunfire Reborn

First Of The First-Person Shooter Roguelikes

Changing the player’s perspective from third to first-person might seem like a small matter, but there weren’t many roguelikes before Gunfire Reborn that did anything like that. Fusing the genres of roguelike and FPS, this game lets the player experience the havoc they wreak in an entirely new perspective.

The game has plenty of fun builds, characters, and weapons, making it perfect for casual co-op sessions with friends. The unique abilities of each character, their upgrades and skill trees, and the variety of weapon choices keep players coming back for more.

2 Hellcard

Co-Op Card Game With Depth

• Developer: Thung Trunk
• Publisher: Skystone Games
• Release Date: 2024-02-01

Take Dungeons & Dragons, give it some classic roguelike elements, add multiplayer capability, and transform the mechanics to work beautifully as a card game, and Hellcard is born. The game is a great single-player experience, but it truly shines when two or three people make a party to take on the descent to hell together.

The game takes heavy inspiration from Slay The Spire, but it has plenty of things to set itself apart. Hellcard follows the same kind of route as other deckbuilding roguelikes but distinguishes itself from the crowd with its party and multiplayer mechanics.

1 Risk Of Rain 2

Petrichor V Never Saw It Coming

Risk of Rain 2 is the type of game that sucks a player in as soon as they pick it up. From the start of the journey up until you finally manage to beat it, every moment is filled with high-octane action, friendly banter, and a multitude of tasks for the players to enjoy. Risk of Rain 2 is a co-op roguelike with a punch, containing multiple stages that can be repeated as much as the players want, and a single-player mode that works just as well as the co-op.

There’s a lot to love about Risk of Rain 2, from the item and enemy variety to the unique survivors that players can choose for their runs. Perhaps the most important part about Risk of Rain 2 is the inherent randomness, which the game utilizes quite effectively to make each run feel fresh and engaging.