2025 was the year friendslop reigned, and so many low-cost ways to have fun with your pals couldn't have come at a better time

It sure has become a lot harder to convince your mates to drop 60 bucks on a game you'll all play for half an hour on a Thursday evening, hasn't it? Those elevator pitches stopped working on me long ago—the economy's fucked, I like to eat, and I've unfortunately developed my mother's penchant for the finer things in life. I've got bigger and better things to make poor financial decisions about than videogames.

Where I can be convinced, though, is when the game costs nary more than a cup of coffee or a sweet treat from that fancy bakery down the street. My five dollar coffee only lasts me 15 minutes, what does it matter if this five dollar videogame has the same staying power?

There have always been free-to-play excursions and dirt-cheap scoops that we could get a few hours of fun out of on a tipsy Friday night. But 2025 has been different, delightfully so. It's been a year where we've seen the dawn of "friendslop" (a term that makes me shudder, so I'm going to try and minimise its usage), a slew of ridiculously endearing co-op games to play with friends.

It was a year where I really felt like this strange little corner of gaming hit its stride. Banger releases, all of which did something just different enough that they all had their place among my Discord servers' rotation of games.

REPO kicked things off at the start of the year—a horror extraction in a similar vein to 2023's Lethal Company, its spookier themes offset by everyone walking around as colourful robot versions of South Park's flappy-headed Canadians.

With bulging eyes that frantically move around and jilted text-to-speech that one person couldn't help but spam "777777777777777777777" through over and over again, REPO offered something different with its emphasis on differently-weighted items that would lose their value as groups smashed them against door ways, dropped them down stairs, and smacked each other over the head with them.

It really lets people lean into the comedy while still retaining horror elements, and for a mere $10 I more than got my time with it. But I admit that I've grown somewhat weary of the way so many of these games rely on big scares and tension to manufacture these moments. I wanted something that was lacking in spooks without being a variety party game. Then Peak happened.

To the mountains

I won't wax lyrical too much about Peak here—I did enough of that already considering it's my Personal Pick in our Game of the Year Awards—but its eruption in popularity and wildly different vibes to anything else in the space absolutely gripped me.

It still has all that tension that makes cutting it with hijinks and pranks against your pals hit that much harder—carefully navigating over giant gaps or desperately clamouring up a cliff with the last bit of your stamina is equally as frightening as being chased by an eldritch being.

Peak manages to dish out shenanigans in droves, but also presents players with genuinely good and intuitive climbing mechanics that makes the game interesting beyond its clippable moments. And by god, it's cheap. Price-to-playability, I'd argue it's one of the best bargains out there.

Those are probably the two biggest friendslop champions of 2025—hell, Peak has adopted that term with full sincerity, with LandCrab going all-in on the term. But it wasn't the only two: RV There Yet tried to strike a similar vibe to Peak except for trying to navigate a giant motor home around tiny winding roads. Guilty as Sock offers a virtual courtroom to go all-out in improv trials that'll have you screaming over each other, and I would have certainly had a better time with Mage Arena if my first game hadn't consisted of strangers shouting slurs at me in-between spells.

More than anything, I just love that there've been an increasing number of low-cost ways to have fun with your friends. Times are hard—particularly in the UK, where I live—and it doesn't quite feel as easy as it once did to dedicate the finances to social events. Being able to connect with the people I love most on a regular basis and centering those interactions around something silly and near-infinitely replayable is a blessed thing, and I'm thankful to 2025 for giving so many new and neat opportunities to do just that.