Today we’re seeing double, with two couch co-op games that fit into a growing subgenre I can only think to call “labor action,” Moving Out, and Totally Reliable Delivery Service. If you’re at all familiar with Overcooked, another title I highly recommend, you’ll see these games share a similar idea: do a job, well but quickly, under different constraints and within different environments, by cooperating with your partner or team. And more often than not, fighting against physics. However, while the two titles we’re looking at share similar goals, their playstyles and design philosophies are quite different.
Moving Out -from indie developers DevM Games and SMG Studio, and publisher Team17- is, as the title suggests, a game about moving furniture. And as is standard in these types of games, this job is a “by any means necessary” affair. Windows and unpacked vases be damned! The art style is simplistic but is very specific, with bright and beautiful colors, clean lines and definition to the environments, and character designs that are almost too cute to mention.
But I will because there’s a cat with an eyepatch and an unlockable cup of soup guy that I can’t help but gush about. You can put a leek in his head!
Anyway, you and up to three other players are members of a budding new moving company run by a boss seemingly just made of cardboard boxes with a face drawn on it. There is an overworld map of a very cute town, and you will be tasked with navigating your little truck to locations as they unlock. It’s actually quite similar to Overcooked in this fashion, but you get to ram your little truck into traffic and fences, which can be a delightful distraction at times to break up the action between jobs.
The jobs themselves involve moving specific household items -designated with a flashing sheen- from their rooms to the truck parked outside. The challenge begins so basically with whether an object can be carried easily by one person or if it needs to be team lifted, as they say in the biz. Small items such as cardboard boxes or individual chairs can be picked up, run with, and thrown by one person, while items like beds and refrigerators must be picked up by two people, and they must both time their button presses to toss the item in tandem. The controls are rather simplistic and individual items can be rather simple to grab and chuck out the window to the truck, but the bigger items take more precise movements and teamwork to even get them outside, as well as to figure the best placement in the truck.
That loop alone is very satisfying and the teamwork and chaos are delightful, from electrical cords snapping off items you’re yanking around, to maneuvering around the environments, which is where the core challenge truly lies. How do you and your team squeeze the couch around three built-in planters and a window? Well, the window is easily smashed when you get to it, but the obstacles will need cunning, teamwork, and the Ross of your friend group shouting “Pivot!” Sure you can toss boxes over the impossible to cross swimming pool to your partner at the truck, but if it’s a fragile box, you better hope they catch it, lest it explodes in a shower of packing peanuts and shame. It is a nice balance of obstacle course, critical thinking, and teamwork that steadily adds new and fun environmental challenges with each location.
They give you plenty of planning opportunities via a static image of the area’s floorplan on the job select screen, and then with a nice sweeping looped aerial shot of the actual map before you truly begin. It was a nice way to think tactically and have the team ready to roll as soon as the clock started. My wife and I really enjoyed the structured nature of it all. If you find yourselves having trouble, the time between failure and restart was very short. You never felt punished by using trial and error, which is key in a title like this. I recommend Moving Out, a cute, easy to learn, fun to master title to anyone who enjoys spatial problem solving, and a bit of chaos.
Though similar at face value, I felt Totally Reliable Delivery Service was quite a different title in many ways. Another indie game, this time from developer We’re Five Games and publisher TinyBuild Games, this title feels a lot more like the ridiculous physics platformer Human Fall Flat. While the focus is still on co-op manual labor marred with comical difficulties, the challenge comes less from the environmental hazards (though some of those too), but rather more from the over the top physics and purposefully obtuse character control.
-Now, I do want to take a digression and be upfront here, I’ve played a lot of games, and I enjoy a challenge, but games that have a core desire to be punishing are not my cup of tea. It’s the reason I’ve never managed to finish a From Software game, as much as I think Dark Souls is crazy rad. I can see the puzzle pieces, I understand the timing it takes to “git gud” and the fact that the difficulty is the point, but that’s not exactly why I play games. It’s a perfectly valid reason for folks who do play games for that, but I don’t need my games to kick me in the guts and again when I’m down. Similarly, my wife and co-op partner for life is not a super seasoned gamer. She likes a challenge as well but is still learning the language of modern gaming as a player, not just an observer. She’s not bad at games, but she’s still mastering the fundamentals. I want to get all of that out there because I can absolutely understand why this title has solid review scores, but it was not the game for us.-
Totally Reliable drops you and your partner or team into a fairly large sandbox world in which technology never advanced past joysticks and buttons, where you are tasked with taking packages from their dispensers -which are spread out all over the sandbox overworld- and delivering them to their destination either within a time limit or without destroying them. There are numerous vehicles to use to that end, from trucks to dune buggies, to helicopters. The character and environment designs are colorful and very simple sometimes to the benefit, such as the hilarious jiggly lumps of flesh with hairpieces and floppy socks filled with goo for arms that serve as characters. But sometimes to its detriment such as with its often sparse and spread out overworld. It all seems basic enough, but the job itself gets complicated when it turns out that you and your team are controlling little blob people who seemingly just discovered their limbs.
The controls are actually quite interesting, at least when playing with a gamepad as we did. Each trigger controls the grabbing of each respective arm, with the shoulder buttons doing the same but with lifting the arms. This also worked the same with the controller’s joysticks, so when you grabbed a device with the left trigger, the left stick would control the device and so on. I liked the principle behind it, but it was quite janky at times. For instance, if you grab and control a vehicle with your character’s right side, the right stick would control the movement of the vehicle. But by doing that you give up control of the in-game camera, which can make driving a nightmare, especially since you’re a sock puppet in a UPS truck trying to dodge a runaway ambulance. It took us quite a while to get mostly comfortable with the controls, and even then we always felt like we were fighting against them. I understand that the wacky nature of the physics and movement is the gimmick, but I am personally not into that. When it comes to a challenge in a game, I prefer when it is something about overcoming, using spatial awareness or timing, but I find it less enjoyable when the difficultly lies in purposeful jank. I would rather tackle an environment than wrestle the controls, personally.
Which ultimately for us was an issue in the end. Of the couple of hours we managed to play, we maybe attempted five deliveries and did four of them successfully. The rest of the time was spent figuring out and experimenting with the controls as we farted around the map, flying planes, jumping on trampolines and getting flung off of carnival rides. The wife lamented that the game was called “Totally Unreliable,” not just because the package delivery methods are wacky and might not work out, but rather because we gave up on our jobs entirely to ride fire extinguishers into the clouds. While it did make for some fun, the fun was ultimately as fleeting as our careers as delivery specialists.
I often complain that there are not enough couch co-op games out there anymore that aren’t just on a Nintendo console, but that isn't exactly true. These two titles are actually available on all three major home consoles, PC, Mac, and Totally Unreliable Delivery Service is even on android. Personally, for me and my co-op partner, Moving Out was exactly the right kind of title, with a structured and challenging, but also fair mission structure and a fun gameplay loop, it’s something we’ll absolutely come back to. Totally Unreliable wasn’t quite for us with an at times overwhelming loose structure to mission acquisition, as well as controls and physics that felt like wrangling cats, but for folks who really like a punishing challenge and something to overcome, it might be the right thing for a pair or group of masochistic pals. For those of you with the Xbox Game Pass, it costs you nothing to give either one a try, and for our Mac and PC pals, both are on sale as of writing, on their respective platforms (Steam for Moving Out, Epic Store for Unreliable). A little team building never hurt anyone, though it certainly can cause some property damage.