Lethal Company

There is a version of this game that is just funny. Someone gets grabbed by a creature they did not see coming, their death rattles over proximity chat, and the remaining three sprint for the ship laughing. That version is real and it is great. But the tension underneath it is also real, because the quota does not care about your feelings and the monsters are genuinely designed to wreck a plan. The co-op loop of splitting up to scavenge, regrouping under pressure, and making bad calls together is where this game lives. I ran this at a LAN session last winter and we were still going at 2am. The sessions are short enough that one more run is always the honest answer.

Lethal Company runs on almost anything, which is part of why it became such a phenomenon. The scavenging loop is short, social, and funny in the way that only happens when everyone in your group is panicking simultaneously. On Steam Deck the low hardware demands make it one of the cleanest indie installs on this topic, and controller support is solid enough. It missed the main list because R.E.P.O. occupies roughly the same lane with slightly stronger current momentum, but if you already own Lethal Company it is a very easy handheld co-op recommendation.

The first time my group played this, someone sold a beehive to the company for six credits while the rest of us were being hunted through a derelict facility by something we still cannot identify. That pretty much covers it. Lethal Company runs on low-spec hardware, loads fast, explains itself without a manual, and produces genuinely funny horror stories every single session. Missions clock in around fifteen to twenty minutes, which is perfect for rotating players in and out over a long evening. It sits just below Phasmophobia because the scares are slightly less sustained, but for sheer event-night momentum it might actually be better.