Heya,
both my girlfriend and i are really into speedrunning for years now and we were thinking about wanting to get into one aswell. We've been thinking about what to play but thats the hardest part for us right now...
First of all we guess there aren't that many 2 player games out there that are really prominent in comparison to all the single player speedruns. And for those which are, it seems to us that something like going competitive/fast in Portal 2 is a bit much in terms of input twitchyness for some portals etc..
Its less about the difficulty in going fast for us and more about that we have some interesting technical stuff to solve, or completely planning out factories in Factorio or something, its hard to explain...
Take Human Fall Flat as an example.. its more interesting for us than Cup Head. Despite Cuphead being difficult in its level design to go fast, Human Fall Flat is more difficult because of its mechanics.
Also it would be nice if its a <1h run if done well. Or in general if you were even able to split workload on some parts so not both players doing the same thing all the time and maybe one does something in location x and the other something else at location y. Does anyone have any ideas?
Emulated or modded games for MP possibilities are fine aswell. I'd like to gather some ideas to talk it over with her.
If your into more older style 2 player games you should look at @FelipeNascimento83 or @Ellimist or @RitaH
The Dungeons and Dragon ones look interesting but other than that, bullet hell/shoot'em'ups or fighting game sidescroller are probably less of a thing for us. If there is something where you can do some setups to go out of bounds or do some other crazy stuff, that would be neat aswell. I think we are looking more modern.
Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker comes to mind. It has some interesting routing where the two players need to go after different gems, which allow you to reach later levels faster.
https://www.speedrun.com/cttt/full_game?h=Any-Switch_Co-Op&x=7kjqwzd3-rn115evn.p12wwxv1
not really what you asked for but: you could also try to do 2p1c (2 players 1 controller) runs. dont think that many boards have it as a category but that doesnt mean you cant do it:D and mods may add it as a category if you run it