Not Every Co-Op Game is “Friendslop”

By Bee Wertheimer | July 10, 2025 | 1:00pm

Main image: Lethal Company. Other image: Peak.

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Humans are pattern-seeking creatures who have made sense of the world around us by categorizing things. In an era of endless streams of content begging for our attention, we’ve trained ourselves to become very efficient at determining what is worthy of our time. With the rise of AI-generated garbage infesting digital spaces, a term has been popularized to classify media as immediately discardable: “slop.” Slop is low-effort content designed to farm engagement (i.e. everything on Facebook).

In March 2025, Twitter user @wooosaaaahhhhh coined the term “friendslop” to describe the current trend of small-budget co-op survival games. The co-op craze was spearheaded by the 2023 title Lethal Company, a horror game where you and your friends are tasked with exploring scary alien planets and collecting items to meet a quota while being hunted by monsters. Streamers took to Lethal Company because of its capacity for emergent narratives ranging from terrifying to hilarious. Its procedurally generated maps make each playthrough unique, and its low-poly art blended with modern rendering techniques is visually remarkable.

Following Lethal Company’s success, a slew of low-budget horror co-op titles have spawned in its wake, including Landfall’s Content Warning and semiwork’s R.E.P.O. These games vary in quality, with most being rushed out to cash in on the trend. Thus the term “friendslop” emerged to define this rapidly-oversaturating co-op subgenre.

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But Lethal wasn’t the first of its kind. Left 4 Dead came out in 2008, and Phasmophobia in 2020. So, why is the horror co-op market flooding now?

friendslop peak game

Lethal Company is an underdog story. A truly independent game, it was created by game developer Zeekerss at just 21 years old, with a relatively small scope and affordable price tag. If you haven’t watched Acerola’s breakdown of its rendering pipeline, you may mistake Lethal’s aesthetic as easy to replicate. Even when I played it, a game developer the same age as Zeekerss but with only half his experience, I thought to myself, “I could make something like this.”

There is also something to be said about how social habits have shifted following the pandemic. Online gaming was one of the only avenues for human interaction during lockdown, and therefore became one of the most popular quarantine activities. Even while the games industry implodes, the market continues to grow year after year. Playing video games is a fun and easy way to spend time with friends, so why not pick up the affordable co-op game your favorite streamer’s playing?

The most recent entry in the so-called friendslop genre is Landfall and Aggrocrab’s 2025 title Peak. Borne of a month-long game jam, Peak is an aesthetically and mechanically endearing multiplayer game about nature scouts climbing mountains. While certainly entering a market primed for co-op success, it diverges significantly from Lethal Company with adorable art, elegant climbing mechanics, and a clever stat management system.

Peak explores cooperative gameplay unlike any other game I’ve seen. If you make a particularly difficult jump, it’s your sworn scout duty to turn around and hoist your friends up alongside you. In a run where I fell to my death very early on, my friend carried me all the way up the mountain, bearing my burdensome weight with a selflessness that made me tear up. He tried reviving me twice along the way, but didn’t know that in order to administer bandages to another player you have to hold right-click instead of left.

Every small-scale co-op game released after Lethal Company, including Peak, is dubbed friendslop, regardless of quality or resemblance. The very game that started the trend itself is called friendslop. And, sure, some of these games are kind of sloppy—R.E.P.O. never managed to justify its existence for me, and that’s one of the more celebrated ones. But to delegate an entire genre of games as worthless, even jokingly, is unfairly reductive and evidently false. Creating a game within a trending genre is not inherently soulless, and even terrible games have a right to be made and played. Categorization is helpful, especially when it signifies malicious media like AI. But designing a game to be played with friends doesn’t make it slop.

Bee Wertheimer writes about and makes games in New York City. You can find them on Bluesky or visit their site beewertheimer.com.