A game for the 2 of us

I'd been searching for a game that the wife & I could play co-op (2-player) style for quite awhile. We've played a few games together before, but have always had to settle for MMOs, like SWTOR or LOTRO, or team-based shooters, like Overwatch. She wasn't a big fan of LOTRO and I grew tired of the same old grind in both LOTRO and SWTOR. I've grown increasingly tired/frustrated with Overwatch and the gameplay limitation requiring that we have to play with other, mostly rando – often rude/bad/troll – players in order to play, let alone possibly enjoy, it at all – it's the game style, I understand that, but the experience often left me wanting.

So after after some research I discovered Valheim. It's a game that you can play solo or with others – but also one in which you can run your own private game server. This means that I can host my own game server that could be available on my own home network (LAN) – even if our Internet service goes down. This is old-school gaming brought into current times! I can remember the many times I'd enjoyed a locally hosted Diablo or Counter-Strike gaming session with just the people I really wanted to play with. This looked promising!

There had been a lot of positive word about Valheim online recently, so without even consulting her beforehand, I bought us both a copy of the game, researched how to get a local private server running on my PC, installed the game on both of our PCs, and then excitedly waited for her to get home from work (I work from home.) To make sure we both had the same initial experience I didn't read anything about how to play the game or any guides or anything other than how to set up the server and how to launch the game so we'd be playing exclusively together on that server. Then I let her know that we'd be trying a new game together that night and that we would both be learning from complete scratch! She was intrigued.

I digress here for a moment to mention that I have a tendancy to over-research games: watching gameplay videos, checking out "how-to" write-ups, etc. for most of the games that I've played in the past. This game has been one of the few exceptions to that rule, as I truly wanted a fresh experience for the both of us (other than the how-to set up of the dedicated LAN server) so that I wouldn't end up doing the typical "here's how you do X/Y/Z" and establishing myself as the "expert" of the game. It was important to me that I felt 100% as green as she did when we started playing.

After dinner we both sat down at our respective computers and launched the game. "What do we do…?" she started to ask, and I was happier than I expected to be able to say "I have no idea. We have to figure out everything together!" Our prior gaming experiences gave us enough of an idea of how to get started, how to move, along with the helpful – but basic – in-game queues. We both found ourselves pleasantly surprised at discovering things *together*. Calls across the room of "Oh, it looks like we have to gather things and craft stuff." "What the heck is that?!" "Oh, that's how you run?" "How do we find each other?" and many other similar exclamations of discovery were uttered, often with plenty of laughter. The first boss fight had us laughing about how ill-prepared we had been and at how many, many, many times we died trying to figure out how to defeat it (she figured out the strategy that ultimately led us to victory). It was glorious!

We played for about 90 minutes exclaiming in surprise and laughing our asses off the entire time, just making a go of it and not having an inkling of what we might *supposed* to be doing. We both agreed that it was the most fun we'd had gaming together and couldn't wait until we could continue the adventure.

We've come back to play many times over the past 6 months, sometimes solo, but mostly together since our first night and we still enjoy every moment. We're now eagerly awaiting the Mistlands release!

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TLDR: Wife & I started playing this together and much fun was had!