If there’s a single throughline for the PC gaming year that was 2025, it’s finally accepting that the pursuit of fancy graphics just doesn’t make sense anymore.
Tech has hit a hard graphics plateau: raw generational updates are now nuanced upgrades measured in single-digit frame gains rather than evolutions anyone with eyes can appreciate, and the subsequent pivot to AI-generated frames and experimental hair follicles aren’t really revving anyone’s engines when those upgrades cost a month’s rent. Even if the latest hardware really was all that, the precarious AI bubble is locking normal humans out of it anyway.
It’s good timing, then, that cutting edge graphics are increasingly irrelevant to keeping up with the hobby. A bright spot of 2025 was the continued rise of “friendslop,” a cringey internet-spawned label for a broad genre of cooperative games designed for groups of friends.
Though it looks like it’s sticking, friendslop is a terrible name for these games, because it (perhaps unintentionally) lumps them in with a growing pile of low-effort games cranked out by anonymous Steam grifters every day, and of course, actual AI slop. The well-intentioned use of “slop” probably refers to the subgenre’s deliberate use of janky physics and ragdolls to conjure comedy. In REPO, navigating a valuable and fragile vase down narrow hallways is uncomfortable, awkward, and intense—much like actually moving a cherished piece of furniture from one house to another.
But there’s nothing sloppy about games with a simple premise, instantly learnable controls, and crucially, with an art direction that accommodates whatever hardware you have to play them on. To have all of that at once and still end up with a fun game is anything but low-effort.
Depends on the game. Lethal Company? I wouldn’t call that slop at all. Content Warning? Yeah, no, that’s slop. It was a fun little jaunt to try it out for free, but that game felt so shallow and burned out on me so incredibly fast that if I had paid anything for it I’d probably have felt ripped off.
To me, “friendslop” doesn’t necessarily mean the game isn’t fun or has “bad graphics,” it instead means that it 1) relies heavily on friends to be fun and 2) has some element of feeling like either a cash-in or a low-effort project. I don’t count Lethal Company because it doesn’t have either issue for me. Content Warning, meanwhile, was worthless to me in singleplayer and relied so thoroughly on the camera as a gimmick that it feels like the epitome of the term. Hell, it was literally made as a break from a larger project, so I think it cinches the “low-effort” part, at least relative to other games.
R.E.P.O., however – which you didn’t mention but which I still have thoughts on – I’m torn on. On one hand, the gameplay is a more detailed and engaging form of what Lethal Company has, and it can easily be fun alone. On the other, the way semiwork interacts with their community in their news videos feels like Youtube engagement rot so strongly that it taints the game for me by extension; it (and their emoji abuse) makes me feel like the game has the “love and passion” of a dorm room dildo prank, even though it’s well-put-together enough that there’s no way that’s the case.
Edit: I should probably also add that it is absolutely possible for me to feel that a game does have love & passion behind its development, and yet still qualify to me as friendslop. I think the best way to explain this would be to liken it to a Youtuber who makes engaging and deep videos, but who also uses a lot of clickbait and algorithm-hacks to drive engagement too. It’s not that so much that the developer is being a bad or careless person so much as it is that the game itself has an ick about it, which is unfortunately always going to be extremely subjective and ill-defined. As another example: I called PEAK friendslop when I first played, softened up on that feeling over time (especially when the very excellent Mesa update hit), and then the feeling came right back when they announced some concert or other occurring in the game like they were Fortnite.