Who says video games are asocial and isolating? People who don’t know “Chariot,” that’s who. This witty gaming platform requires a good teammate and a comfy couch. Whether you play with your girlfriend, brother or child, there’s only way to go forward in this game – through cooperation.

The game features a princess and her fiancé who must carry the late king’s funeral wagon through various levels and environments while trying to ignore the king’s ghost’s constant bullying. It seems like a tragic situation, but it’s not. Even though he’s dead, the king is very demanding about his final resting place: “It’s too dark, too cold. I need more gold!” In their search for a suitably royal burial site, the princely couple go deeper and deeper into a network of underground caves that are full of surprises.

“Chariot” is the first game developed by Frimagination, an intrapreneurial program in the style of “The Dragon’s Den” and Google Labs. To foster creativity within its team, Frima, a studio based in Quebec City, invited all of its employees to submit game concepts. If a concept was to management’s liking, the employee would be given time off to develop a game prototype. If the prototype proved promising, a team would get to work on it to develop the game. This is what happened to Philippe Dion, the hyper-creative programmer who envisioned and developed “Chariot.”

Unlike online gaming trends, “Chariot” is not played on the web – it all happens in a single room. In industry jargon, this is known as a couch co-op plateformer. In other words, it’s all about cooperating with a player sitting next to you. “We wanted to bring back the fun of playing a video game with a friend in the same room. This requires communication, which brings players closer together,” says Jonathan Quan, who managed quality assurance for “Chariot.” The game can be played solo, but it really comes into its own when played with a friend. Each player holds a rope on either side of the chariot, that is, the funeral wagon.

Certain puzzles are designed to be solved by two brains. Both players must cooperate in pulling, pushing, sliding, and moving the chariot from platform to platform through the game’s 25 levels. “We wanted to build a game based on communication and personal contact. The players share a broad range of emotions, including pride, annoyance, and frustration, but the experience should culminate in high fives,” states project manager Richard Demers.

With increasingly difficult challenges and enemies hiding behind every corner, only the most adventurous and strategic players reach their goal.