Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge
Vampire Survivors with a friend is surprisingly slow. Typically, the indie hit feels frantic as your character automatically uses various weapons so you can defeat waves of oncoming enemies, scoop up experience gems, and race toward far-strung items across levels. The perfectly tuned colors and sounds that make the game feel like walking through a pixel-packed casino add to the chaos.
But when playing Vampire Survivors with my wife on the Nintendo Switch, I noticed that I was suddenly being a lot more thoughtful with every move I made. The game’s new co-op mode forces you to share a screen with up to three of your friends, and that meant my wife and I were constantly communicating so that we could safely inch around levels and use our…