Patch Quest

The lasso is the whole trick. Loop it around a monster, and you can mount it and borrow its skills as your own. There are more than 50 species, each with its own set: some fly, some swim, some leap across hazardous terrain, and all of them hit hard in a fight. The ones with googly eyes are the most dangerous, which feels like a design choice made specifically to humble you.

Riding a monster unlocks more of its skills the more you use it, and those unlocks stay. Caught monsters can be leveled up and kept as pets, and you can send a few home to camp between runs. You drop a lasso on a snarling boss, it works, and suddenly the biggest thing on the island is on your side.

Patchlantis is an island cut into a patchwork of tiles, and every night a storm reshuffles the terrain. Each run plays out differently, but nothing you earn is wasted: the map's layout may move, your progress does not.

The real structure comes from shortcuts. Unlock a gate here, clear a path there, and a criss-crossing network of routes slowly opens up, letting you push deeper into more dangerous zones. Between runs you return to base camp, spend what you found, and set out again. It is a roguelite with the memory of a metroidvania, and the difficulty is honest: the game tells you plainly that you will have to get good.

Monsters are only the start. Over 200 unique plants and minerals are out there to collect, and gathering them feeds permanent upgrades to your character. Exploration gadgets expand how you move and what you can reach, so the island opens up in stages.

Then there are the ammo fruits. Gather them on a run and blend them into ammo smoothies, which turn your blaster into something considerably more persuasive. You will need to use everything you find to survive out here, and the game means it: the collection habit runs deep, and it is easy to lose hours to one more plant, one more mineral, one more monster for the menagerie.

Patch Quest supports local co-op, and this is the setup it seems made for: two players, one couch, a gamepad each. The game is fast and frantic, so having a partner to split the chaos with turns narrow escapes into shared stories rather than solo near-misses.

It also settles the eternal argument about what to do with a captured boss. One of you wants to ride it, the other wants to send it home to camp; co-op means both. The art is bright and the monsters are cute enough that watching someone else fumble a lasso throw is its own entertainment. If you have a friend who likes creature collecting and another who likes shooting things, this is the game where they meet.