Mark Cerny played a helping hand in designing some of the most respected and beloved platformers of the mid-90s, like Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon. Due to the limitations of those consoles, however, they couldn’t provide a co-op experience. That’s all going to change with Cerny’s PS4 launch game – Knack.

Sony announced today that Knack, like so many other character driven platformers today, will have a co-op mode. Just like in those games, Knack will feature drop in and drop out co-op so your friends and family can join in the action without interrupting it. That’s where the similarities end though.

The co-op characters in Knack – known as Robo Knack – plays a lot like the regular Knack. He is a little different though in that he can donate parts to and heal Knack with a press of the triangle button. In a sense, Robo Knack will be the character that the more experienced gamer will play as to help the less experienced player.

Here’s a trailer showing the co-op mode in action:

Aside from the co-op mode, Sony also revealed a social element to Knack’s collect-a-thon gameplay. At certain points in the game, the players will find secret chests containing items which can be combined to create gadgets. Upon finding one of these chests, the player can either take the item that was found in the chest, or the item that a friend found in the same chest. Here’s the full explanation:

Finding these secret rooms and collecting gadget parts and Relics is fun, but it’s even more fun when you have friends playing the game as well. Whenever you find a secret chest, you’ll be able to either take the item you found in the chest, or choose any item a friend found in that same room the last time they played. This can really come in handy when you’re trying to complete those gadgets or unlock that last Knack variant. Your gadget collection even carries over to new playthroughs, so you can work on getting all eight handy gadgets.

Finally, Sony shared more details regarding that Knack mobile game that we reported on yesterday. In short, it’s a simple match-three puzzle game for iOS that allows players to win items that can be transferred over to the console game. While the game is currently only available for iOS, Sony confirmed in the blog post that an Android version is coming soon.

[Image: PlayStation Blog]