R.E.P.O.

I've been burned before by Early Access co-op horror games that peak in a single weekend, so when R.E.P.O. landed in February 2025 I kept my expectations low. Three hours later my entire friend group had bought it and we were screaming into proximity-voice-chat while a giant blob flung its own head at us across a haunted museum. So much for low expectations. Here is the loop, stripped down: you and up to five friends are Semibots, little bean-shaped robots with Muppet mouths and stubby arms, deployed by a mysterious overseer called the Taxman to ransack procedurally generated locations. Factories, manor houses, wizard towers, museums, all of them stuffed with valuables you need to physically wrestle onto a padded cart and haul to an extraction point before the Taxman's countdown expires. The word "physically" is doing real work there. Objects have weight, momentum, and a terrible habit of smashing into walls when two people grab the same end. A grand piano requires genuine coordination to move. A stack of porcelain is a disaster waiting to happen the moment someone panics. That physics layer is the game's entire personality, and it earns every laugh it generates. The enemy roster currently sits at 29 creatures divided into danger tiers, and the variety holds up well across a run. Early levels throw nuisance-tier monsters at you: gnomes you have to pick up and throw to kill, a duck that begs to be grabbed and then transforms into a razor-toothed predator the moment you do. Higher tiers get nastier. The Heart Hugger drags you toward it with pink gas before unloading a combo. The lanky Tim-Burton-looking thing that drags a weapon behind it is completely deaf, which means stealth actually matters against it, while a later update added the Birthday Boy, who is harmless right up until someone pops one of his balloons and he hunts you to the ends of the map. Each monster forces a different team response, which keeps the group conversation interesting well past the first few sessions. Post-launch updates have also expanded existing maps significantly, so returning players are not just retreading old ground. For the "four friends on a Friday night" question I always ask: yes, absolutely, with one important caveat. R.E.P.O. is an online-only co-op game with no split-screen and no native controller support. Gamepad users will need third-party tools to remap inputs, which is a genuine friction point if you are hoping to plug in and play immediately. The game is also meaningfully harder and less funny in solo runs, since a lot of the comedy comes from shared panic, proximity voice chat, and someone else making the terrible decision that gets you both killed. Go in as a group or go in expecting a stiffer experience. On the Early Access front, semiwork has been consistent with updates and developer logs, which is a good sign, but content depth for longer runs can start to feel thin after extended sessions, and balance around higher-level enemy waves has been a vocal community concern since the big monster update dropped. None of that changes the bottom line for what this game actually is at its best: the funniest co-op horror experience you can find right now, built around a physics system that makes every job feel genuinely handmade and unpredictable. Bring five friends, accept the chaos, and do not grab the duck.

Riley · Scout Team

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