Biped

Biped is a co-op action-adventure game developed and published by NEXT Studios, built around one core premise: two players control bipedal robots one leg at a time, and almost nothing works unless both players are talking, laughing, or mildly arguing. Each character's legs are mapped to separate inputs, which means walking in a straight line already requires deliberate coordination. Stack on top of that a series of physics-based puzzles involving rotating platforms, rope mechanics, weight distribution, and timed switches, and you have a game that turns communication itself into a gameplay mechanic. From a systems perspective, Biped is deliberately narrow. There are no skill trees, no build orders, no late-game complexity curves to optimize. What it offers instead is a clean escalation of spatial and timing challenges across a handful of themed worlds. Levels introduce mechanics gradually, and the game never weaponizes its tutorial against newcomers. If anything, the onboarding is one of the smoother examples in the co-op puzzle space. A first-time co-op gamer can sit down with an experienced partner and contribute meaningfully within minutes, which is rarer than it sounds. Solo play exists but functions more as a mechanical curiosity than a proper mode. The game was clearly designed with a second human in the room, or at least in a voice chat. What works consistently is the physical comedy produced by the control scheme. The wobbly locomotion creates emergent chaos that the level design leans into rather than fights against. Puzzle solutions that look trivial on paper become genuinely tricky when one player missteps and sends a shared rope object swinging off a cliff. The aesthetic is clean and friendly without being aggressively cutesy. Runtime is the honest caveat here: a focused pair will clear the main content in roughly three to four hours. There is some additional challenge content for completionists, but Biped is not a game that hides fifty hours behind its cover art, and it does not pretend to be. The 85% positive Steam rating across nearly eleven thousand reviews reflects a player base that understood what it was buying. The Metacritic score of 74 is fair. Critics who docked points for brevity are not wrong, but that criticism applies to the genre category, not an execution failure. NEXT Studios made a tight, coherent experience that does exactly what it sets out to do. The AI in solo mode is functional but uninspiring, which is the one area where additional investment would have meaningfully expanded the audience. Mod support and post-launch content are essentially absent, so the experience is fixed at launch scope. Biped belongs in your library if you have a specific co-op partner in mind and want something low-friction to play together. It is an ideal pick for pairing with someone who does not usually play games, a partner, a sibling, or a friend you want to introduce to cooperative play without the learning cliff of a survival game or a tactics title. For solo players or groups larger than two, the value proposition shrinks considerably. Go in with the right person, and the three-to-four hour runtime will feel appropriately paced. Go in expecting a sprawling co-op campaign, and you will feel the edges of the experience long before the credits roll.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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