Heave Ho

What it is

Heave Ho strips co-op platforming down to a single, deliberately silly physical action: your character has no arms or legs, only a face and two hands, and the entire game is played by grabbing onto walls, swinging bars, and — crucially — each other's hands to fling yourselves across increasingly elaborate courses toward a coin. Up to four players work through the same obstacle together, and the game's entire comedic engine runs on the gap between intention and physics: reaching for a teammate a half-second too late, dragging someone into a hazard by accident, or watching a carefully coordinated chain collapse because one player let go at the wrong moment. Developer Le Cartel Studio, published by Devolver Digital, released it on 29 August 2019 at NZD 14.75, with character customisation options adding extra silliness on top of the core physics comedy.

Its review corpus, 1,091 in English, sits at a strongly Very Positive 91.9% — but what's most striking about reading through it isn't the score itself, it's how consistently specific and personal the praise is, paired with an equally consistent and specific complaint that shows up across reviews written years apart.

Why it works, according to an unusually consistent chorus

Few games in this lane have produced as uniform a description of the actual experience of playing them as Heave Ho. "When my wife, a non-gamer, plays this game and laughs so hard that she cries and asks to play again, I know it's a good game," writes one reviewer, and that specific shape of anecdote — a non-gamer, a family member, a group of strangers, all reduced to tears of laughter — repeats constantly and independently across the corpus. One reviewer distills the entire game into three rules: "Grab My Hand," "Grab the Coin," "Gimme a Kiss." Another, self-described as having "no friends," reports playing solo and still having "so much fun," suggesting the core mechanical chaos holds up even without a full group, though nearly everyone agrees the experience multiplies with more players in the room.

The gap that won't close

Set against that remarkably consistent praise is an equally consistent, specific, and pointed complaint: Heave Ho has no true online multiplayer, and years after release, reviewers are still asking for it in exactly the same terms. "Please insert an online multiplayer game," reads one of the most-upvoted reviews in the entire corpus, written by someone whose friends bought the game specifically expecting to play together remotely. A later reviewer, writing well after launch, states it even more bluntly: "fun game but cannot recommend until they add online multiplayer. ITS 2025" — a review dated years past release, underscoring that this isn't a launch-window complaint that got patched, but a persistent, unaddressed gap. Steam's Remote Play Together feature exists as the closest available workaround, letting one owner host a session for remote friends, and while some reviewers say it works acceptably, others report it "isn't working either," leaving them without any reliable way to play with people who aren't physically present.

A secondary, related complaint concerns the hard cap of four simultaneous players: one reviewer, clearly having built real tradition around the game with a regular group, specifically laments having a fifth friend who can't join in, calling native 8-player support the one thing that would make it "the best couch co-op" game outright. A separate, unrelated technical complaint concerns cloud saves — at least one reviewer reports losing progress entirely despite the feature being present, forcing a restart from scratch.

What the achievement data says about how groups actually play it

Heave Ho's 23 tracked achievements show a distinctive shape worth reading alongside the anecdotal praise. Early, easy-to-reach milestones — collecting a first token, completing a level without anyone dying in co-op or solo, triggering a first minigame — sit in a fairly tight band around 35-43% completion, indicating a solid majority of buyers who install the game do get a real session or two out of it. But achievements tied to full completion, unlocking every costume, or getting every player in a session to emote happiness simultaneously all cluster under 1%. That steep drop is worth interpreting carefully: unlike a single-player game where a similar curve might suggest a difficulty or content wall, a party game's achievement completion depends heavily on assembling the right group of people at the right time repeatedly, not on any one player's skill or persistence. The most plausible reading, consistent with the reviewer testimony above, is that most owners get their money's worth in a handful of memorable, laughter-filled sessions with whoever happens to be around, rather than treating it as a game to be systematically completed solo — which is exactly the use case the game's own design and its reviewers' anecdotes both point toward.

Why the online-multiplayer gap matters more than it might for other genres

It's worth being explicit about why the missing online mode is such a persistent sore point here specifically, rather than a generic feature request every multiplayer game receives. Heave Ho's entire comedic value proposition depends on shared, real-time physical presence — the specific joy described throughout this corpus is watching a friend's face, hearing them yell in frustration, reacting in the same room to a shared collapse. Local multiplayer games as a genre have increasingly leaned on remote-play technology to bridge the gap as friend groups scatter geographically, and a game this reliant on spontaneous, chaotic co-op timing is exactly the kind of title where an unreliable remote-play substitute is felt most acutely. That's likely why this specific complaint has remained the loudest, most consistent thread in the review corpus for years rather than fading as a launch-window gripe — the friend groups this game is built for don't always live in the same house or city, and the game's own design keeps reminding them of that gap every time Remote Play Together falls short.

Verdict

Heave Ho delivers exactly what it promises for the audience it's built for: a simple, endlessly replayable physical comedy engine that reliably produces genuine laughter across an unusually broad range of players, verified by dozens of strikingly similar independent accounts. Its single glaring weakness — the total absence of real online multiplayer, still unaddressed years into its life — is worth taking seriously before buying if remote play with friends is the goal, since Remote Play Together is an inconsistent substitute at best. For anyone who can get people in the same room, though, this is as close to a guaranteed good time as party games get.