5 Steam Games for a Summer Friday Night With Friends and Cold Drink

Friday night arrives. Everyone joins Discord, someone opens Steam, and then five grown men spend half an hour staring at their libraries as if they are choosing the next Secretary-General of the United Nations.

One guy wants something competitive. Another says he is too tired to think. Someone recommends a survival game that requires watching a 47-minute beginner guide before anybody can open a door. Eventually, the group starts the same game it played last Friday, loses twice and begins blaming the servers.

We can do better.

The five games below are easy to recommend because they become fun quickly, cost $10 or less at their standard US Steam prices and do not require everyone to train like an esports team. You can climb a mountain, hide by painting yourself, destroy a camper van, terrify some monsters or make Garry’s Mod do whatever strange nonsense your group finds funny.

If nobody wants to play anything, forget the whole operation and put on one of our comedies you can watch with the guys again and again. Otherwise, open Steam and pick one of these.

1. PEAK

US Steam price at publication. Sales can change it.

PEAK is a co-op climbing game where you and your friends are stuck on an island and must climb the mountain at its centre. The smallest mistake can kill you, which means the game becomes a very quick examination of your group’s patience, coordination and ability to resist being complete bastards.

In theory, PEAK teaches friendship. You help people over ledges, place ropes for the group, share questionable food and drag injured teammates towards safety. It is quite beautiful when everybody works together.

Then your friend throws you off the mountain because he thought it would be funny.

Now you are dead, watching his playthrough and quietly hoping he misses the next jump. True friendship has been revealed, and it turns out true friendship is mostly waiting for your chance to take revenge.

The mountain changes every day, so repeated attempts do not feel identical. PEAK also has proximity chat, which gives everybody enough time to hear your confidence turn into panic while you slide backwards towards a very avoidable death.

It works best when the group is willing to help each other but cannot be trusted completely. In other words, it works with almost every group of male friends ever assembled.

2. MECCHA CHAMELEON

US Steam price at publication. Sales can change it.

MECCHA CHAMELEON is multiplayer hide-and-seek with one excellent little idea: the hiders begin with white bodies and must paint themselves to match the environment.

You choose a hiding place, copy the colours around you and pose in a way that might convince the seeker that you are part of the scenery. This is where you discover whether you are a hidden artistic genius or a man who should never be allowed to choose the colour of his own kitchen.

When a disguise works, you feel brilliant. Your friend walks past three times while complaining that the game is broken, and you sit there looking like a badly painted wall lamp while trying not to laugh.

When it fails, the seeker finds you immediately because your version of “dark green” looks radioactive.

The game is even better when your friends are terrible at spotting people. You can hide somewhere offensively obvious, watch them inspect every distant corner and slowly realise that one of them may need to book an eye test.

MECCHA CHAMELEON is cheap, simple and supports larger groups than most games on this list. Nobody needs a long explanation. Paint yourself, hide and begin insulting the seeker’s eyesight.

3. RV There Yet?

US Steam price at publication. Sales can change it.

RV There Yet? is a co-op game about driving a camper van home through a route that appears to have been designed by somebody who hates camper vans.

The whole group shares one RV. You have winches, supplies and various tools that might help you survive the journey. Cooperation would make everything easier, so naturally your friends will spend most of the trip doing anything except cooperating.

Imagine the camper sliding down a hill while you desperately try to steer. One friend is grilling burgers. Another is drinking beer. Someone is smoking what appears to be his five-hundredth cigarette. None of them seems particularly concerned that the vehicle containing all of you is tumbling towards its death.

You are trying to save the journey while these fat guys enjoy the holiday.

That is the game. RV There Yet? turns one player into the exhausted father of a travelling circus while everybody else damages the camper, offers useless advice and asks why he is becoming angry.

The physics give every mistake enough time to become worse. A small problem turns into a bad angle, the bad angle becomes a broken vehicle, and then four people begin shouting instructions that contradict one another.

It is ridiculous, but this is exactly what you want from a cheap Friday-night game. The failure is usually funnier than succeeding.

4. R.E.P.O.

US Steam price at publication. Sales can change it.

R.E.P.O. is a co-op horror game where you enter abandoned locations, find valuable objects and carry them back while monsters search for you.

The official explanation is more complicated, but you are basically a team of garbage collectors working the worst night shift in human history.

The objects use physics, so moving them requires some care. A valuable piece of furniture can become stuck in a doorway. Fragile items can break. Your friends can drop something expensive because they were too busy screaming at a monster or playing rubbish through the proximity chat.

Without the right group, R.E.P.O. is a horror game. The rooms are dark, the monsters are dangerous and everyone must stay quiet at the right moments.

Give one player a soundboard and a weapon, and the genre changes completely.

For your group, it becomes a comedy and an action film. For the monsters, it becomes a horror game about several small idiots entering their home, blasting terrible sounds and hitting everything that moves.

The proximity chat carries most of the fun. You hear a friend’s voice disappear into the distance, followed by one confused scream and several seconds of silence. Nobody knows whether to rescue him or protect the expensive object currently stuck behind a chair.

Usually, the chair wins.

5. Garry’s Mod

US Steam price at publication. Sales can change it.

Garry’s Mod has been on Steam since 2006 and still refuses to die because it barely tells you what to do. It gives you a physics sandbox, a massive Workshop full of community creations and enough tools to turn one evening into whatever nonsense your group wants.

You can build vehicles, create machines, play established multiplayer modes or download things that should never have been placed in the same digital room.

One minute, everybody is experimenting with normal physics and stacking boxes. Twenty minutes later, Tung Tung Tung Sahur is fighting the Avengers while somebody launches a rainbow nuclear weapon from a bathtub.

Nobody remembers who downloaded any of it. Nobody admits responsibility. It is still magnificent.

Garry’s Mod requires slightly more preparation because the quality of the night depends on the modes, maps and Workshop items you install. Some multiplayer servers may also require content from other Source games. Once everything is ready, though, the game becomes whatever your friends bring into it.

With normal people, it can be a creative sandbox.

With your friends, it will probably become either a horror movie or a blockbuster made by directors who were removed from the studio for insurance reasons.