Co-op puzzler Death Squared still turns two players into a shouting match nine years on

Death Squared asks two people to trust each other with a joystick. SMG Studio built a puzzle game around that premise in 2017, and it still holds up as one of the cleaner co-op designs of its era — a game that understands cooperation is a mechanic before it is a theme.

Trailer, via SMG Studio.

Color-Coded Cubes and Their Goal Zones

The setup is spare. Players guide color-coded cube-shaped robots across a board, each one headed for its own designated goal zone. The trick is that the robots share the room. Moving one cube can shift platforms, raise spikes or fire lasers that the other cube has to survive.

That single rule does most of the work. Death Squared never needs a story to explain why two players should talk to each other, because the level geometry does the arguing. One player steps forward, a platform drops, and the other player’s path opens or closes. The puzzle is the conversation.

Story Mode and Party Mode

SMG Studio splits the game into two modes, and the difference matters more than the names suggest.

• Story Mode: solo or two-player co-op, built around a set of guided puzzles
• Party Mode: co-op for up to four players
• Single-player support: the Story Mode can be played alone
• Multiplayer support: local cooperative play is the core of both modes

The four-player Party Mode is where Death Squared gets loud. More cubes mean more simultaneous movement, more accidental spikes and more explosions, which is the game’s whole comic register — robots dying because someone moved at the wrong time.

Where Death Squared Runs

Death Squared spread wide. SMG Studio developed and published it, with CIRCLE Entertainment and Halfbrick Studios also attached as publishers across its various releases, and the platform list reads like a census of the late-2010s market.

The 2017 launch covered consoles and computers. Mobile arrived a year later. That spread is not a footnote — it is the reason a small puzzle game with no franchise behind it stayed in front of players for years.

A Bird’s-Eye View of the Problem

The camera sits above the board in a bird’s-eye, isometric perspective. That choice is not decorative. Players need to see both robots and the whole trap layout at once, because the danger in Death Squared is almost never hidden. It is visible, and it is your partner’s fault.

The genres attached to Death Squared — platform, puzzle, strategy, tactical, indie — oversell the strategy. This is a puzzle game with tactical consequences, not a tactics game. The thinking is spatial and social, not statistical. Its themes are listed as kids and party, which fits: the robots are cute, the deaths are slapstick, and nobody bleeds.

The 7.0 and What It Means

Death Squared holds a 7.0 out of 10 across the IGDB critic aggregate, drawn from seven outlets. That number is fair, and it is also a little misleading, because it averages two different games. Played solo, Death Squared is a competent puzzle game with a control scheme doing work it was not designed for — you are operating two cubes with one pair of hands, and the game’s central joke about communication has nobody to communicate with.

Played with a second person on a couch, it is sharper than most of its peers.

That gap is the real story of Death Squared. The game’s best ideas — the shared board, the environmental triggers, the way one player’s move rewrites the other player’s plan — only fully land when there are two people in the room. SMG Studio knew this. Story Mode supports solo play, but it is the co-op configuration the design is built around, and Party Mode pushes further with four.

The explosions are the marketing. The communication is the game.

What Death Squared Gets Right

Death Squared does not waste the player’s time. Levels are short, failure is instant, and restarting costs nothing, which is exactly the right structure for a game where most deaths come from a misjudged moment rather than a misunderstood rule. The color-coding is clean, the goal zones are readable at a glance, and the environmental hazards — shifting platforms, rising spikes, lasers — are legible before they kill you. That is good puzzle design: the player should feel stupid, not cheated.

The weakness is variety. Death Squared has one strong idea and iterates on it for the length of its content, and the later puzzles lean on precision rather than invention. The four-player Party Mode adds chaos, but chaos is not the same as depth, and a group of four will exhaust the novelty faster than a pair will.

Still, the core holds. A co-op puzzle game lives or dies on whether two people keep talking after the tenth failure, and Death Squared keeps them talking.

Two Players, One Board

Death Squared is a small, well-built co-op puzzle game that earns its reputation on the strength of a single clean rule: your move changes my board. It is not a solo game wearing a co-op hat, and it is not a party game pretending to be a puzzle game. It is a puzzle game about two people, and it works best when there are two people.

At 7.0 out of 10, it sits exactly where it should — a strong recommendation for anyone with a second player and a couch, a much softer one for anyone playing alone.

co-op puzzle game · Death Squared · indie game review · local multiplayer · Nintendo Switch · SMG Studio