Moving Out

There’s a specific genre of video game that only works when there are other people in the room, and Moving Out is unashamedly one of them. Developed by Australia’s SMG Studio and DevM Games, published by Team17, it arrived on April 28, 2020 into a market that had just spent four years falling in love with Overcooked. The comparison is unavoidable and the developers clearly knew it. Timed levels, escalating environmental gimmicks, a cheerful cartoon aesthetic, four players screaming at one screen — the skeleton is borrowed. What’s different is the flesh on it.

You play a freshly certified Furniture Arrangement & Relocation Technician — F.A.R.T., a joke the game commits to with a straight face — working for Smooth Moves in the town of Packmore. Every level is a job. Empty the house, fill the truck, beat the clock. Where Overcooked is about precision under pressure, Moving Out is about controlled demolition. Doors are suggestions. Windows are shortcuts. That sofa is going out the second-storey window because the stairs are a nightmare and gravity is free labor.

Critically, it landed in the upper-middle: a Metacritic average of 79. That number tells you something honest: this is a very good party game, not a masterpiece. The recurring caveat in positive coverage — that the campaign runs thin — is the same note buried in nearly every review’s final paragraph.

Two DLC packs, Movers in Paradise and Packed to the Rafters, extend the job list. They’re good. They’re also a tell that the base game needed more.

• Physics-first destruction: Every object has weight, momentum, and a hitbox that resents you. Two players carrying a couch is a genuine negotiation of angles. One player dragging a fridge across a live highway is a decision with consequences.
• Four-player shared-screen chaos: Up to four movers on a single screen, no split view. The camera holds everyone together, which forces the group to physically stay near each other — a design constraint that generates more comedy than any scripted gag could.
• Assist Mode: Extend or remove timers, lighten objects, shrink obstacles, skip levels entirely. Granular, non-punitive, and never framed as “easy mode.” Genuinely one of the best accessibility implementations in the co-op space.
• Escalating level variety: Suburbs give way to farms, haunted houses, and virtual reality. The gimmicks arrive faster than they wear out.
• Hidden Kitty Cassette levels and arcade challenges: Optional bonus objectives and secret unlockable stages give completionists a reason to replay jobs they’ve already cleared.

The Gameplay Loop

Strip Moving Out down and the loop is almost insultingly simple: pick up thing, carry thing, put thing in truck. Repeat until the house is empty. What keeps it working is that the game never lets “carry” be a solved problem.

Grabbing is mapped to a single input, but characters grab with both hands, and the object’s mass determines how much it fights back. A lamp is trivial. A wardrobe requires a partner, and the moment two players are attached to the same object, the game creates a physical linkage that translates every disagreement into torque. One mover wants to go left, the other wants to go right, the wardrobe wedges in the doorframe and the timer keeps running. This is the entire game, and it is very funny.

The dash-throw is the mechanic that separates Moving Out from its inspirations. Furniture can be hurled. Through windows. Off balconies. Into pools. The game actively rewards this — jamming a mattress through a pane of glass is faster than navigating a hallway, and the sound design pays it off with a satisfying crunch. Most co-op games punish recklessness. This one budgets for it.

Where the Loop Frays

The friction is real and it’s mechanical. Item grabbing is imprecise by design. In a cluttered room, a grab regularly latches onto the wrong object, or clips the corner of a table nobody intended to touch and sends it spinning. In a game where every second is scored, a mis-grab is a scoring penalty delivered by the engine rather than by player error. That’s the difference between hard and unfair, and Moving Out wobbles across the line more often than it should.

The camera compounds it. Because all four players share one view, the framing constantly negotiates between people heading in opposite directions. When the group splits — one mover upstairs, one at the truck — the camera pulls back and objects get small, or it refuses to follow and someone ends up shoved against the screen edge. It’s the correct design choice for forcing group cohesion. It’s still the source of a real chunk of the frustration.

Solo Play Is a Different, Worse Game

Let’s be blunt: the single-player campaign is a compromise, not a mode. Alone, the two-person furniture negotiation becomes a slow shuffle — grab one end of a couch, drag, pivot, drag again. The comedy of failure requires a witness. Without one, the fiddly physics stop being a punchline and start being an obstacle course. Most levels remain beatable solo — the game is tuned for it — but nothing about the design argues for playing it that way. For a solo buyer, this is the wrong game.

The Assist Mode Deserves Its Own Paragraph

This is the part of Moving Out the industry should have copied more aggressively. The options are surgical rather than binary. Timer too tight? Extend it, or turn it off. Object physics too heavy for a seven-year-old with a Joy-Con? Lighten everything. Stuck on one level? Skip it and keep the campaign moving. Crucially, none of it is gated behind a shame wall — no “are you sure?”, no reduced rewards, no separate save slot. The game treats difficulty as a preference, not a moral test.

The practical effect is that Moving Out is one of the very few co-op games where a competitive adult and a five-year-old can meaningfully play the same session. That’s a smaller design achievement on paper than “physics-based destruction” and a much larger one in a living room.

Structure and Longevity

The campaign is short, and that’s the ceiling on the whole package. Bonus objectives and Kitty Cassette levels stretch it, and the arcade challenges are decent palate cleansers, but there’s no procedural content and no endless mode to fall back on. Once Packmore is packed, the game goes back on the shelf until friends visit. It’s a party game in the truest sense — content designed to be consumed in company, in bursts.

The art direction is clean, flat, and slightly retro-90s — bold color blocking, chunky silhouettes, VHS-tinged menu flourishes. It’s not trying to be beautiful. It’s trying to be readable at speed with four objects airborne, and it succeeds. Every piece of furniture is instantly identifiable from any angle, which matters enormously when scanning a room for the last item before the clock dies. The character customization leans goofy — unlockable movers with increasingly ridiculous designs — and it’s charming without demanding attention.

The soundtrack is the underrated star: upbeat, funky, unobtrusive, and consistently name-checked in user reviews as a reason people kept playing. Sound design does real mechanical work too — the specific crunch of glass, the thud of a fridge landing wrong, the truck-load confirmation chime. Half this game can be played by ear.

The physics simulation is the demanding part of the package, and a 2D game of this scope is light on hardware even so. What matters more is that this is a shipped, finished, polished product, which is more than a lot of co-op games of its era can claim.

Steam is the stronger version on paper, with the best Metacritic showing at 79 and — critically — Steam Remote Play Together, the only way to play Moving Out with someone who isn’t in the same house. It’s a workaround rather than a feature: Remote Play streams video, and streaming latency is a real cost in a game built on precise two-person carries. Same-room play is the intended experience. Keyboard-and-mouse is technically supported and practically pointless; a controller is the right tool.

Nintendo Switch is the version most people should actually own, and the reason is social logistics. A single pair of Joy-Con split horizontally gives you two players out of the box, no extra hardware, no setup. The game’s two-button control scheme fits a sideways Joy-Con almost suspiciously well. Undocked, the shared camera pulls objects small, which hurts more on a handheld screen than a TV; docked, it’s the ideal setup. The Switch build makes the usual portable compromises, and the busiest destruction-heavy levels are where they show. Portability wins the argument anyway. This is a game you bring to someone else’s house.

Neither platform has online multiplayer. That’s not a platform nuance — that’s a design decision, and in 2020 it was already a strange one.

Moving Out knows exactly what it is and refuses to pretend otherwise. It’s a short slapstick routine built around a single excellent joke — that moving house is miserable, and doing it with friends is miserable in a funnier way — and it sustains that joke about as long as its content allows. The physics are the engine, the destruction is the release valve, and the Assist Mode is a piece of design generosity the rest of the genre still hasn’t matched.

The flaws are structural, not incidental. Imprecise grabbing taxes players in a game scored by the second. The camera does necessary work and charges for it. And the missing online mode isn’t a nitpick — it permanently caps who can play this and when, in a way Overcooked eventually addressed and Moving Out never did. Remote Play Together is duct tape.

We rate it a mixed package: buy it if there’s a couch and people to put on it, and skip it otherwise. There is no third answer here, and the game’s Metacritic average of 79 is the sound of an audience finding that out and being mostly happy with the result anyway.