It takes two

split fiction

These two were the top two favs of my wife and I last year. Played it takes two on our steam decks, and split fiction on our PCs. One of them is older and handled it great. Both pcs run linux.

Semi-casual games that run well on older PCs and linux? Plus no launchers? Let's see.
I got a few but there may be splitscreen ones in this list too. (If that's ok)

• Battleblock Theater
• Biped (maybe?)
• Cassette Beasts
• Castle Crashers
• Children of Morta
• Don't Starve Together
• Dinkum (If Australian Animal Crossing sounds interesting)
• Factorio
• A hat in time
• Guacamelee
• Human Fall Flat
• Hyper Light Drifter
• ibb & obb
• KeyWe
• Kingdom Two Crowns
• Knights and Bikes
• Like, all of the lego games (They're all similar mechanically, so pick one of the newer ones that look good)
• Lovers in a dangerous spacetime
• Magicka (I like the first one but the second one isn't bad)
• Monaco
• Moon Hunters
• Necesse
• Peak
• Resident Evil 5/6 (Yes, really, its a great time in co-op)
• Satisfactory
• Secrets of Grindea
• Split Fiction (This one may be graphically harder to run?)
• Stardew Valley
• Spiritfarer
• Terraria
• Trine games
• Valheim (At least until mistlands)

I'm kind of going off of semi-casual meaning not high intensity shooters or things that require crazy skills. Most of these are pretty easy to pick up and are generally forgiving. They shouldn't have launchers but if they added one in a later update, then dang.

Lovers in a dangerous spacetime was a ton of fun! Very adorable, simple mechanics, plays on one screen, and not too hard. Also came out over 5 years ago so win win

Stardew valley? Farming co op game has a LAN mode so you can play together. You can do a casual playthrough to learn or try to min max like my wife does.

Portal 2 has great puzzles for two players, but the timing can be frustrating

Kingdom: Two Crowns is great fun in co-op.

I really enjoyed We Were Here with a good friend. It's a coop escape room like puzzle game where you'll play in different rooms but your puzzles interact with the other room and you'll have to communicate and work the two rooms together to solve it

Do you like puzzle games? I played Blue Prince with my wife and that was pretty fun. She's not much of a gamer, so I just drove and she took notes. We talked about decisions/speculated on puzzles together.

I’ve posted about this somewhere else too, maybe a different account idk.

But for games to play with people that aren’t really “gamers” I actually prefer single player games with light amounts of fast paced action or none at all. The “coop” comes from taking turns with the controller.

This works well with puzzle or logic games with generous reaction time requirements (again, or none at all), as well as story based games with light action. A lot of these games also come with natural pauses in the story that provide opportunities to either swap who is driving or put the game down for the day.

I’ve had a lot of success playing through many of these titles with partners. I’m sorting these roughly by category and then how strongly I recommend them. Some of these games I haven’t actually played yet, but I know them to fit the overall vibe.

Puzzle/Logic - no reaction time required

• Chants of Sennaar (HIGHLY recommend, requires decent notes and map making, so the person not using the controller still has a job)
• Strange Horticulture (HIGHLY recommend, also requires some light note taking to make life easier)
• Strange Antiquities (sequel to above, have not played yet, high expectations)
• Return of the Obra Din (have not played yet, high expectations)
• The Case of the Golden Idol + DLCs (STRONGLY recommend, got a bit burnt out by the end, but very fun, also light note taking)
• The Rise of the Golden Idol (sequel to above, have not played yet, moderate to high expectations)
• Baba is You (HIGHLY recommend, nice learning curve but becomes brutally difficult towards the end of the game)
• Myst (HUGE game, very good, but daunting and little to no hand holding, detailed notes required)

Kind of a category within a category, haven’t played these, but they’ve been referred to as 1.5 player games.

• Spiritfarer
• Chicory
• Child of Light

Puzzle/Logic - aim and reaction time needed

• Portal 1
• Portal 2 (and its coop if you have 2 devices)
• Portal Reloaded (community mod adding a portal through time with some seriously mind bending puzzles)
• Portal Revolutions (another mod, haven’t played yet but looks fun)
• Viewfinder (HIGHLY recommend, spiritual successor to Portal IMO and a very, very good game)
• Superliminal (HIGHLY recommend, a “Portal-like” that uses perspective as the core mechanic)

Story Based - some action sequences requiring aim and reaction time and some puzzling

• Stray (just a cute good time with some spooky, heart rate spiking moments where you really don’t want your kitty to get hurt)
• Alien Isolation (if you’re horror movie people at all this is like an interactive movie)
• Shadows of a Doubt (might be a miss for a lot of people, immersive detective sim)
• Firewatch (played this a long time ago, might not hold up)
• Dredge (spooky but cute fishing sim with good story)
• Summertime Madness (not much reaction time needed, but still some aim or speed based puzzles)

All of these that I’ve played were on either Arch (custom), Arch (Garuda), or NixOS based systems under Proton. Two of those systems were installed from scratch and they performed flawlessly, so if you’re on a system that handles all the audio and video driver installation for you things should be very smooth. The Garuda machine is a laptop from 2016 that is plugged into my TV and actually saw the most play time for these titles. It held up perfectly. The other two systems were back to back installs on my fairly beefy desktop, but installation and running the games was smooth after the initial effort to get the systems fully functional with drivers and controller support.

Honestly the coop play on Lego PC games is pretty good if you can get over them being cartooney. You have lots to pick from too, so maybe your partner has movies they're a fan of that are represented in Lego games.

My gf and I enjoyed:

Stardew Valley

Starbound

Cook Serve Delicious 2 and 3

Out of Space

Overcooked 2

Pizza Possum

PEAK

Biped

Cat Quest 2

Cats Love Boxes

Core Keeper

Temtem

These are the good ones (the ones where I felt like she was having a blast) which should run on anything. She’s also not good at games and has a fairly low-powered laptop. Looking back at them I can‘t believe we‘ve played that many lol

We‘re currently playing Schedule I but it‘s so buggy in co-op that I can‘t recommend it…

Since you mentioned platformers, Rayman Origins might be worth a look. It's a 2D platformer from 2011 so it doesn't require a lot of power, levels take a few minutes to complete which makes it perfect for short sessions and it has local co-op (up to 4 players).

I tried it recently on my desktop (Pop!_OS, ubuntu based) and Steam Deck, played without issues on both of them.

Split fiction was great fun for my partner and I, the story is mid but gameplay is probably the best action adventure coop I've played. It has so much variety to offer.

Abiotic Factor has been a blast with a friend. I don't play a lot of survival games (I prefer more narrative than most offer, and Grounded was a great one for that) and this one doesn't take itself very seriously (you craft weapons and armor from general office supplies a lot of the time... I've never been so excited to find a cache of staplers).

May want to turn the difficulty down if she gets overwhelmed easily, as while they majority of the game is pretty manageable, there are the occasional hard fight.

It Takes Two, or Split Fiction, by the same developers. Both are fantastic games, designed around couch co-op.

Stardew Valley. My wife and I just started playing it together. It is a good time. Genuinely fantastic game.

I picked up gaming in 2022 (played all the Halo Games, Star Wars Fallen order and Survivor, Dark Souls) and she hasn't played anything since childhood in the 90's... We are both loving Stardew.

My wife surprisingly loved Divinity Original Sin 1/2 can be played on controller splitscreen or M/kb

Since she likes puzzles, the Trine game series could be nice! I think they added coop multiplayer starting with Trine 2.

If you both like hack 'n slash then Torchlight 2 is also great fun!

Another vote for It Takes Two

"A Hat in Time" is an excellent 3d-platformer with local (split-screen) co-op.

"It Takes Two" is the game you are looking for.

Farm Together 2 is AWESOME

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2418520/Farm_Together_2/

The graphics are nice but don't make the game stand out which is a minor shame since this is by far my favorite "build a farm" type game.

Splitscreen co-op and multiplayer is a blast and the game flow is very chill but rewarding.

I’m in a similar situation with my wife not being particularly interested in games - I’ve had some success in playing LA Noire with her guiding the investigations and interrogations. The jazz soundtrack in particular helped convince her, funnily enough!

Not quite perhaps what you’re looking for, but may work for others with hesitant non-gamer partners.

I don't have specific games to recommend because there are many of many genres. I'd instead suggest to make trying out cooperative games as an experience for you both. The fun will be in exploring them on your own. Or the frustration. He he.

Some obvious suggestions seem to be:

• Terraria
• Stardew Valley

Sorta requires another account... technically.. .Minecraft. IDK, maybe hytale would fill that niche. There's also some FOSS options like luanti that would be nearly indistinguishable.

• Left4Dead2
• Portal 2
• No Man's Sky

Some lesser known stuff:

• Core Keeper
• Dungeon Defenders
• RoboQuest
• Valheim

Category suggestion: Kart racing. There are no shortage of brands of that... sonic just came out with a new one and there's a couple really good sonic kart racers already out there that are on steam and console. Played a lot of sonic and all stars racing transformed with my wife and we had fun... it goes super cheap on sales and has remote play together so you'd only need one copy for both of you... https://isthereanydeal.com/game/sonic-and-all-stars-racing-transformed-collection/history/#price-chart:overview , mario kart, etc.

es-de is a really nice front end you can have in steam for couch coop emulation, I hear.

minecraft?

From the top of my head I can think two:

• Battle block theater is a platformer puzzle game and really fun to play in local coop, and it runs on almost anything.
• Sonic All stars racing is a really fun Mario kart like racing game with local multiplayer.

Not sure about Linux support though, so check it out first, but both are relatively old titles so I think they have a good chance to run.

Seriously? How has no one suggested Untitled Goose Game or did I miss it? It is frigging hilarious and if you both like humor and fooling around as a mischievous goose, it is perfect! I played it with my 7 year old and we had tons of fun, plus the ending was the cherry on top!

Edit: also, similarly hilarious but a bit more stressful to play, Pizza Possum, my kid was and is nornally absolutely not into fast-paced gaming, but this one was an expection and is also hilarious to play together and it was a blast collecting all the gadgets. We still come back to both games regularly.

Portal 2 coop is phenomenal.

Civ 6, the whole Picross lineup on the switch (emulated ofc), Cassette Beasts, Minecraft Java (which can be a pain to setup but once its good its good), Halo MCC apparently has a new split screen mod. You get a lot with a switch emulator due to all the fantastic first party games by Nintendo. Also look into Nucleus Coop.

Tl;Dr: try Cassette Beasts