A small two-player puzzle playground
With You is a short, wordless co-op game built around one idea: two characters meet, and the level design keeps pushing them apart and pulling them back together. The stages are made of physics and platforming problems, and the controls are deliberately awkward on purpose, so progress comes from coordinating rather than from quick reflexes. The look is minimalist and hand-drawn, with colorful, abstract spaces and a cartoonish tone. Nothing in the game is violent. It was made in 2019 by Carol Mertz as an MFA thesis project at the NYU Game Center, solo, and it is intentionally tiny — expect something brief and a little wonky rather than a long campaign.
How a pair plays it
This is a strict two-player game: one person on each character. The challenges require both players to act at the same time — coordinated moves, trust falls, and problem solving where one player's abilities open up options for the other. The actions and goals shift in how intimate they feel as the game goes on, which is the emotional through-line: the characters grow closer as you learn to rely on each other. Since there is no text, everything is communicated through what the level asks you to do, so you end up talking to each other constantly about what to try next. Remote Play Together is supported, so one person can host and a friend can join in from their own machine.
Before you start
Go in expecting a mini-game: short levels, a simple premise, and the roughness of a solo student project rather than a tightly polished platformer. It's built to be approachable for people who don't play games often, so it works as a first co-op experience for a pair, though the awkward controls mean you will fumble for a while before things click. The intended audience is couples, but the design is really about any two people practicing better collaboration — patience and talking things through matter more than skill. Set aside an evening, not a weekend.