The game began its life after a successful 2013 Kickstarter campaign that brought its developers, “The Fun Pimps,” half a million dollars. They released an early build on Steam a few months later, joining the increasingly popular practice of releasing games to eager players before development is finished and the bugs are hammered out, in part so developers can learn from player behavior and adapt the game in response. Now, nearly three years later, the game is still in alpha—that is, not yet even beta—form, and the lack of polish often shows.

Still, for all its flaws, I find myself grateful for this game, at worst a welcome distraction from a litany of depressing headlines, and at best an experience I can savor with a person I love, an experience that reveals and reinforces new dimensions of our personalities and our relationship. And I’m not the only one who treats the game as addictively entertaining couples therapy. One Redditor told a story of looking on in admiration as, right before his eyes, his wife became a bloodthirsty zombie slayer. “I look over to her [in real life] and she is literally bouncing on the sofa,” the user wrote, “a grin as big as the sun spread across her face.”

The intimacy of couch co-op, the pleasure of playing side-by-side with one’s partner, makes moments like that one possible, but it presents certain tradeoffs. The only reason my partner and I can play this game this way is that we forked out the money a while ago to buy a television large enough to make split-screen gameplay tolerable. Winda Benedetti, who writes about games for NBC News, made a different choice with her husband: They opted to buy two Xboxes, so they could play Borderlands together on separate screens. (They made the sensible calculation that the dual setups would be more cost-effective than hours of couples therapy.)

Other couples may get more out of beat-em-up games like Super Smash Bros, or MMOs such as World of Warcraft. The web is rife with lists of good games for couples; the comedian Kumail Nanjiani and his partner Emily Gordon even have a podcast about gaming together. Part of the reason 7 Days to Die has resonated so strongly with my partner and me is that the slow, laborious task of building our base has been a project—like cooking a complicated recipe—that brings into vivid focus our traits, our differences, and the ways we complement one another.

In life, as in the game, my love is reckless and impetuous, endlessly sweet and giving, but completely unabashed about confrontation. He’s the person I yell out for when the presence of a large insect has rendered me immobile, and he always takes care of it with a smile. I, on the other hand, am cautious and diplomatic, wary of public discord, prone to biting my tongue. We still sometimes find a little dark humor in the moment years ago when I had to come down to the street from our apartment and smooth things over with a police officer who was nearly at the point of putting him in handcuffs, after pulling him over for a minor traffic offense. He swore he wasn’t in the wrong, I told him to contest the matter in court rather than yelling at the nice officer, and he escaped with a warning. How often is it, I joke with him now, that a white guy in D.C. calls a black guy who’s not his lawyer to make sure the cops don’t haul him in?