When a friend invited me to play a new game called REPO earlier this year, I thought I was wasting my money — not because the game looked bad, but because it looked like Lethal Company. The surprise-hit 2024 co-op survival horror game has players wander through unnerving ruined structures collecting trash while evading monsters. Lethal Company was popular with my friends (and just about everyone else), but its eerie liminal spaces spooked me too much. My friends swore REPO was different, though, that it was so funny it was hard to be scared, especially with its goofy robot avatars — and they were right.
REPO has become one of my favorite games, and was one of the biggest co-op titles of 2025, along with similar indie co-op hit Peak. Over the past several months, the two titles have become the faces of a new niche of games with a somewhat controversial name: “friend slop.”
The term usually refers to indie co-op games that are best experienced with friends and have an emphasis on humor. They’re typically PC games, cost less than $20, include proximity voice chat, feature wacky game physics, and often fall into the survival horror genre. Friend slop isn’t always scary, though. Some lighthearted flavors of “slop” popped up this year, like Peak, where you attempt to scale increasingly perilous mountains with your friends.
That’s just the tip — or rather, peak — of the friend slop iceberg. There’s also Guilty as Sock!, where you and your co-op buddies roleplay court showdowns as sock puppets. Lockdown Protocol takes inspiration from Among Us, a precursor to the friend slop trend, where one player attempts to sabotage their friends as they complete chores on a timer in a lonely base. Mage Arena is one of the cheapest friend slop games to arrive this year at just $2.99. It’s also one of the most unique — you compete in magic duels with your friends by verbally shouting spells.
Friend slop games tend to follow a similar formula: You and your friends need to accomplish something together, but the consequences for failure aren’t particularly intense (and it’s often funnier if you don’t succeed). Peak is a perfect example. I have yet to survive to the end of a run, and yet I keep playing. Winning Peak is great, but the most entertaining part is watching your friends miss a jump and fall off a mountain, eat poisonous food, or get chased down by the scoutmaster for running ahead.
In friend slop, the main objective is humor. Winning is secondary. If you’re hoping for a deep, nuanced plot, you’ll probably be disappointed. Friend slop games also tend to lose their charm when you’re playing solo. REPO just isn’t the same when there’s no one there to laugh every time you clumsily shatter a vase.
Therein lies one of the major criticisms of the genre and one of the reasons it’s been labeled “slop” to begin with. While REPO and Peak have been hugely popular this year, some say they’re just designed for viral, clippable moments and lack substance beyond that, partly because they’re not usually fun to play solo.
That could be a fair drawback depending on what you expect from these games. However, it misses the point of “friend slop” and overlooks a potential explanation for their popularity this year.
Elden Ring Nightreign was also one of 2025’s biggest co-op games, and I’ve had a great time with it as well. However, it offers something completely different from REPO or Peak and feels drastically different to play, despite technically being under the same broad co-op umbrella. Nightreign requires concentration, skill, and strategy, whereas REPO mostly just requires you to keep an eye out for monsters while absentmindedly picking up junk. It’s also a much more affordable game than Nightreign and doesn’t hinge on any prior knowledge of other games.
That difference highlights one of friend slop’s greatest strengths. For all their arguable faults, friend slop games are approachable. They ask little of you — both in terms of money and time. You don’t even need a particularly powerful PC. These games are a way for people to hang out with friends for little money and laugh with each other. To some, myself included, that’s worth just as much as a rich story or dramatic boss fights.
This year, we’ve seen the prices of games soar, and gaming PC hardware is becoming unaffordable for many. Almost everything about the hobby has become more expensive. Friend slop games offer an oasis from that with low prices and low hardware requirements, staying accessible to a large swath of gamers, even more so because they’re typically easy to learn how to play. The very things that led some people to call these games “slop” are also part of what has made them so popular in 2025 in particular.
Paige Wilson, community manager at Peak publisher Aggro Crab, echoed that sentiment. “We actually think friend slop is a fire term,” they told The Verge. “Sure, it started with the intention of [having] a negative connotation, but I think we always saw the term as funny and actually pretty accurate. It’s used to describe a low-cost game that you and your friends can pick up whenever, have some fun, hang out, and expect a bit of jank. I think some people might not view it as this, but we do!”
In other words, friend slop isn’t so much about the game as it is about the people you play it with. If that’s “slop,” then I’ll gladly embrace the “friend slop” label, too.
