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Friendslop is here to stay, and Peak studio Aggro Crab unsurprisingly loves it.
What is friendslop? Well it's one way to describe the uptick in hugely popular, relatively simple co-op games that leverage group dynamics and improv as a sort of creative goo to hold together chaotic and funny situations that feel perfectly matched to today's content creation age.
Everything is fun with friends, but these games are precision-engineered to be exponentially more fun with friends. Games like REPO, Lethal Company, Content Warning, and Peak stand as some of the biggest friendslop hits, but you could also go to bat for the likes of Overcooked, Human Fall Flat, or recent hit RV There Yet.
To Aggro Crab, half of the Team Peak development crew and sole creator of the upcoming physics-based forklift game Crashout Crew, friendslop is a gift. Community lead Paige Wilson loves the term, which some people have used to dismiss such co-op games as derivative trend-chasers, and level designer Phillip Corrado is also happy to be making more of it.
After Peak, Wilson says "we've had a few people unsure if we're fully leaving single-player games behind, or story games, and being like, 'Are you guys making friendslop forever?' And, well, not forever. We don't know." Aggro Crab is "throwing around ideas and seeing what sticks," and Crashout Crew ended up being pretty sticky.
One thing's for sure. "We love the term friendslop," Wilson says. "We saw the original tweet when it came out, and it had Content Warning and stuff on it, and we're like, oh, from our friends at Landfall. And we love this term. We are adopting this. We proudly wear the friendslop badge."
Wilson thinks the idea has "brought a really fun excitement to the genre of co-op multiplayer games" as something you can play at any time to have a good, fulfilling session with your buddies.
Corrado says "we have often joked in the office that at this point friendslop can be boiled down to: friendslop is when the mouths move," riffing on the likes of REPO, Peak, and the upcoming Big Walk from Untitled Goose Game studio House House. He also hits on an understated immersive element that's contributed to the rise of these games.
"You could make basically whatever type of multiplayer experience you want as long as you get to more embody being in that space with your friends," Corrado explains. "[Proximity] chat has become such a simple but genuinely really nice experience for playing a game with friends, because it just puts you into that space a lot more, which offers people kind of a gateway into role-playing, being in that scenario with their friends."
Corrado and Wilson thumb through the rings on the tree of friendslop, pointing out trends and evolutions over the years. Lethal Company and REPO are about getting as much money as possible, for example, whereas Peak has a more singular goal: reach the peak. Corrado reckons Peak is "more of a D&D one-shot style game" when you beat it, unlike some more arcade contemporaries.
One problem friendslop games avoid is desynced friend groups. More complex, systemic multiplayer games may see "a huge progression treadmill that, if you fall off, you're now behind your friends, and you need to catch up so you can play again," Corrado says. "No, you can just pop in, play with your friends, have a full video game experience, and then pop out."
With Crashout Crew, Wilson reckons Aggro Crab has leaned more into the Overcooked vibe, with friends zooming around arenas in forklifts trying to complete tasks. It's part of the studio's own evolution; Aggro Crab played and studied games like REPO to "kind of figure out what we wanted to take from that over time," and with Peak it removed the horror entirely.
Crashout Crew, which looked very different in early internal game jam iterations about loading cargo, builds on that direction but pushes friendslop into new territory – with a forklift. It's about building stress in a fun way, Corrado reckons, and giving players ways to manage that stress with each other.
"What we kind of learned from other games was what we wanted Crashout Crew to not be, in certain ways," he says. "Where, if we took it in this direction, it would have required a lot of different types of design and implementation. And instead, we kind of started to bring it into this more authored space, while still being light and chaotic and a space for you and your friends to get into problems."
"I don't think the intention for us when we went into it was, 'We're making friendslop,'" Wilson says. "We'd do some stuff and we're like, this is more and more like friendslop. And we're okay with this."
"I'm down to see even sloppier friendslop games," she concludes. "Every day, I wake up in that friendslop."
