Gaming

Have you played Deep Rock Galactic? It's a wonderful games where you play a dwarf mining things, fighting off bugs while you do it. You play in a group of up to 4 people trying to complete your objectives together.

I find it really hard to explain what makes it great, so you'll just have to trust it's avid fan base!

You probably played it already, but if you didn't, Portal 2 has a Co-op campaign and it's really good.

Edit: I opened my steam library for more games and and saw that apparently an unofficial mod Portal reloaded had a co-op update if you already played the original. Anyway here's some more games.

Battleblock theater: a co-op puzzle platformer. It has a bit of a party game vibe with it's humour and ability to mess with your friends, but it has a story.

Don't starve together: a 2d survival game with an interesting drawn style.

FEAR 3: a horror FPS.

Payday 2: a co-op FPS where you rob banks (and other places).

If you and your partner enjoy RPG's, I highly recommend Divinity: Original Sin (and Divinity: Original Sin 2, though we haven't finished that one yet). Very story-driven, the tactical combat is a blast when you get into strategizing and collaborating, and there are all sorts of non-combat shenanigans you can get up to as well (the second even more so than the first).

Deep Rock Galactic

I'm a bit surprised by your premise, games with local co-op have certainly almost disappeared entirely, but I haven't noticed a trend in online co-op. Some good ones off-hand (that haven't been mentioned). These are in descending order if my personal playtime as a rough proxy for how good I think they are.

• Remnant
• Wasteland 3
• Outriders
• Gloomhaven
• Risk of Rain 2
• Warhammer Vermintide 2
• Monster Hunter World
• Left 4 Dead series
• Back 4 Blood
• Borderlands series
• Magicka
• Star Wars the Old Republic
• Helldivers
• Barony
• Barotrauma
• Gods Trigger
• Action Squad
• Aragami 1,2
• Evil West

Dont Starve Together and Overcooked are my jam with wife :3

Here are some rough categories and hours included.

Builder / Survival

Sounded like you were not that interested in this genre but they can be fun co-op experiences.

• Terraria (850 hours) - Two of my friends I have done two clean slate full play-throughs of this game.
• Core Keeper (77 hours) - Also played through the content of this game with same 2 friends.
• Valheim (344 hours) - Did a co-op play through with a friend on this one. Might do it again with Mistlands or with other updates.

Boss Encounters / Building

• V Rising (79 hours)

Played through V Rising with a friend, co-op pve, and it was a blast. We really enjoyed the different boss battles. We are going to revisit this one soon as they dropped / are dropping new content.

Exploration / Melee Combat / Story

• Dying Light 2 (87 hours)

Enjoyed playing Dying Light 2 with a friend, playing the game turned out to a mix of playing solo and playing co-op.

Platformer

• Trine

Fox mentioned this and I'll add it as well. Fun co-op platformer with some fun story telling aspects.

MMO

• Guildwars 2

Fox also mentioned GW2 in the thread. There is a ridiculous amount of content in this game with no subscription required. Combat feedback/force has always felt weak imo but there is a massive world to explore and jumpy puzzles if you are into that (love them).

More story focused co-op

Also watching this thread as I'm curious what shows up. I haven't played many games in this area on PC.

Use the Local Co-Op tag on Steam and you can filter them down pretty well. I played through these with my wife. They were a ton of fun. I put an asterisks beside my favorites.
Darksiders Genesis*
It Takes Two*
Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light (with the Legacy of Kain DLC)*
Secret of Mana Remake*
Unravel 2
Full Metal Furies*
Castle Crashers*

These are good too.

Helldivers*
Road Redemption
Rampage Knights
Broforce
Streets of Rage 4
Huntdown*
Any WORMS game, WMD is great.
Overcooked
Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime*
Speedrunners
Shadowgrounds

When I started to read your post I was going to reply with ItTakes Two, but then I saw you already played it. IMO that is the best co-op game ever. A little bit of everything, amazing graphics, gameplay, music. I only wish I found something close to it.

My friend and I played We Were Here Forever. Not an action game whatsoever. Graphics were meh. Story ok. The challenges were fun but difficult. If you are looking for a "thinking/puzzle" co-op that requires good communication, you may want to give it a try.

Following this post to see other comments, as I would love to try out a good co-op as well.

We recommend V Rising. It's an ARPG (Diablo-like), but with big focus on base building.

You mine, you craft, you build a cool looking goth castle, and then you hunt enemies or bosses using your upgraded weapon and new skills. It's very fun. You can spin up a local server and modify your own server/game rules to increase progress speed (as some features are designed for a 24/7 server, and your game only advances when it's running, so some speedups are necessary)

I want to throw in the We were here series, I love those kind of coop games

• Phasmophobia, 1 - 4 players. A really fun ghost hunting game. There's proximity chat (which I love). You can play it with the intentions of figuring out what ghost it is and winning, or you can try to get each other killed (one of my friends always runs to find the cursed object and use it so one of us dies!)
• Portal 2, 2 players. A co-op puzzle game. I had a lot of fun playing this with my partner.
• Stardew Valley, 1 - 4 players. A harvest moon / farming sim. Has a bit of a story, and can be a very chill / a little grindy.
• Grounded, 1-4 players. It's like The Forest if instead everyone is half the size of an ant and put into a backyard. You have to fight bugs, build with blades of grass, and explore.
• Astroneer, 1 - 4 players, a really fun mining and exploring game in space. There's a story, and you have like 7 planets to explore.
• Project Zomboid, 1 - ? players (I think you can have as many players as the host computer can handle). A HUGE map and there's a lot to learn, and you'll die a lot but it can be really fun to base build and kill zombies with friends. You can customize soooo many difficulty settings as well (make it so zombies respawn after a long time, or they don't respawn at all, if/when the power goes out, if the gas stations ever run out of gas, etc).
• Necesse, 1-? players (not sure what the player limit is, it's at least 4). It's like if Rimworld and Terraria were mixed together. It's very fun with friends. It's in early access but getting regular updates and looks very promising.
• I almost forgot about PlateUp!. 1 - 4 players. This might be categorized as a party game but a single game can be 30+ minutes and it can be very tense managing your restaurant (do I spend money on more plates or another sink, where do I place all the counters??). It's a rogue-lite, and the menu gets more complex as the days go on. If you take too long serving any customer the run is over. Very very fun with friends, can be very chaotic.
• A Hat in Time, 1 - 2 players. A 3D platforming game.

Thank you all so, so, so much for your responses! These are giving me so many great ideas! I'm feeling really hopeful right now and am excited to share these games with my friends and with my partner! The number of responses I've gotten is amazing! I'm really excited to start diving into these games! I'm happy to see so many people out there feel similarly to me as well. Maybe there'll be a resurgence in these kinds of games :)

Again, thank you all so much!

The Trine series is a fun 1-3 player game with a nice story and a few puzzles to play trough.

If you want to explore and do story on the side i can also always recommend Guild Wars 2. Base game is f2p so worthy of a look IMO.

(Not sure about on beehaw or whatever app you're using, but on kbin, you'd choose "article" to make a post without having to include a link.)

Anyway, Stardew valley on PC (it has minimal system requirements and can basically run on any laptop) is the most coop fun I've had. As a bonus, it does support mods. A mod we liked was this one that pauses time when both players have a menu or dialogue up (which pauses time in single player). It let us coordinate our min maxing that we were both a smidge obsessed with.

Unravel Two! I played it with a buddy right after It Takes Two and it was phenomenal. Different vibe, but similar in regards to relying on one another.

baldur's gaTe 3 will have coop.

Micro Mages is a fun little co op platfromer, its not very long, could prolly be beaten in an afternoon.

also it was mentioned in another comment but Full Metal Furries is so much fun! it has adorable character design and the soundtrack is fantastic, its also pretty aproachable in terms of difficulty.

For quick, intense sessions: Darktide. 4 player coop PvE, where you smite the heretics for the glory of God Emperor of Mankind.

An emulator and Parsec. Any game that was couch co-op is now long distance couch co-op.

Madden doesn't let you play on the same team in a franchise unless you're on the same console. I don't have time to regularly play Madden AND have my friend come to the house. Occasionally he pops in for a night and we play a few games, but most of the time we just hop on Parsec and Chat through Discord.

Diablo 4 for console has robust couch co-op, been a blast teaching my wife the fun and joy of questing for loot