Game review: Push Me Pull You brings back joy of playing games alongside a friend
With almost all multiplayer games having gone the online route, this simplistic ‘local multiplayer’ game is a throwback to 1980s and early ’90s gaming
Push Me Pull You
House House
4 stars
Remember how much fun it used to be to head to your rich buddy’s house, slap on some double-teamed Contra-style console action and spend a precious few post-school, pre-dinner hours blasting away? I’m not saying kids these days aren’t enjoying themselves, lost in their photorealistic first-person battle zones, but where’s the fun in playing alongside some random via headset? What happened to shoulder-to-shoulder thrills?
Rare is the game that offers what’s now laughably referred to as “local multiplayer” – and when one comes along, even if it’s filled with minor flaws, it’s still cause for celebration. That’s the case with Push Me Pull You, a mostly cutesy, slightly horrific indie game available for the PC, Mac, Linux and PS4.
Designed in a simple, streamlined cartoonish style, gamers control a literal human centipede – a Chinese finger trap-like anthropoid creature as you push and pull balls around a basic court. It’s sort of like old mobile phone game Snake meets a top-down basketball simulator, where everyone’s slithering their way to jostle for the ball at the same time – except not quite.