It’s 11.45 pm on a Wednesday and four adults on two different continents are laughing into their headsets, because one has slipped off a cartoonish mountain.
“Nooooo!” he calls out in mock horror, as his pastel-hued body ragdolls down the slope. The shout slowly fades. The laughter continues.
The group is playing Peak, a low-budget, low-effort independent release that involves climbing a deadly mountain with friends, in order to be rescued from a deserted island.
Released in June, it was one of last year’s most popular videogames, with over 10 million units sold by late-August.
Peak is now the default face of “friendslop”, a growing and increasingly popular genre that is proving to be quite divisive among gamers.
If the name sounds dismissive, that’s because it is meant to be.
The term can be traced to a 2024 post by X user @regularaugust, who used it to mock a certain kind of friendship-themed anime. A year later, it popped up in a description of the cooperative survival horror game Lethal Company. This is a genre whose “sole purpose of existence is friendfarming”, X user @wooosaaaahhhhh posted.
The term draws, of course, on “AI slop”, which can be traced to 2022 and describes talking cabbages, silly tiny tales and other AI-generated creations designed by bots or engagement-farmers for the millions scrolling mindlessly, at any given moment, online.
In the gaming world, friendslop is now a catch-all phrase for low-budget, low-cost indie releases that serve as entertainment for a group, while demanding very little of them. Some game studios have even begun using the word in promotional material.
The template is loose but recognisable: simple objectives, chaotic physics, simple stylised graphics, and proximity voice chat (players can hear the voices of others when they’re nearby in the game).
Humour and silliness are baked in. Determinedly non-competitive, these games offer, in place of the thrill of a win, the simple joys of watching friends’ avatars fall into a cartoonishly clunky trap or be swept up by a tornado.
In REPO (Retrieve, Extract & Profit Operation; another bestseller released in 2025), players must hunt for scrap in abandoned facilities on desolate exomoons, while avoiding deadly chemicals, traps and monsters — and surviving random, slapstick “physics dysfunctions” that can send them and other large objects flying.
In RV There Yet? (2025), the group must make it through a forest, evading bears, launching their vehicle off ramps, performing periodic repairs, and even sometimes hastily piecing together their own bridges across ravines.
CHAOS REIGNS
Friendslop games can be traced, in a sense, to the pandemic. As the world moved indoors, a 2018 release called Among Us exploded in popularity. In it, cartoon astronauts must figure out who among them is a saboteur. With its simple graphic art, pop colours and minimalist plot, Among Us encouraged lying, manipulation and paranoia; but at least players were no longer fretting about the virus.
Now, the success of Peak and REPO has inspired a host of others.
In the first two months of 2026 alone, new releases have included Burglin’ Gnomes (self-explanatory, with a demo version released so far), Log Riders (two players must dodge obstacles as they ride their log to its destination) and Roadside Research (aliens, posing as humans, must restock shelves, man the cash register and perform other mundane tasks at a gas station).
Plots are unabashedly weird, encourage tomfoolery, and tend to be played for laughs.
It’s yet another blow to the big-budget AAA titles that have been finding it increasingly difficult to compete with an indie industry whose releases range from simple, leisurely comfort games (stock shelves in a quiet library) all the way to multi-player horror adventures.
It doesn’t help that competing with each other has seen AAA budgets balloon. (The much-delayed Grand Theft Auto VI is rumoured to have cost over $1 billion to make.)
None of which necessarily makes friendslop good news. We can’t meet our friends in the real world, or even talk to them, if we’re pretend-falling off a cliff with them as a group. Once again, quality of interaction suffers as the screen takes command of a relationship.
Increasingly lonely and isolated — in 2023, then-US surgeon general Dr Vivek Murthy released a report that suggests enforced solitude has the impact on human health of smoking 15 cigarettes a day — friendslop represents another degree of separation.
Rather than congregate at a third places, we monetise this interaction, our time spent together as a group, and our attention within that time.
There are those who would argue there is no third place any more, and certainly very few that are free. The parks are dwindling, houses are smaller, cafes exorbitant, and schedules more packed as most of us are forced to hustle harder than before.
Back on the cartoonish Peak mountain, someone else slips and falls. Someone refuses to stop laughing. The group makes plans, abandons them instantly, and spends 10 minutes arguing about the “right” route up. They’re never going to reach the summit. But then, they’ve made their peace with that.
