It Takes Two (2021)

An extremely fun game, filled with emotions and chaotic unpredictable scenarios. It Takes Two caught me completely by surprise with the amount of unexpected turn of events and different areas / mechanics it threw me and my wife into.

Wikipedia summary:

It Takes Two is an action-adventure video game with elements from platform games. It is specifically designed for split-screen cooperative multiplayer. The game features a large number of game mechanics from various video game genres. These gameplay mechanics are connected to the story and the theme of the level. Players have to cooperate with each other and utilize these abilities in order to progress.

Review

Setup

Version: PlayStation 5

Difficulty: -

Total playing time: 16 hours (based on PS5 save stats)

Comments

So much fun! This game is what I could recommend for those interested in just getting into the gaming world. It is just a joy to play around and explore, with each different area having its own mechanics and challenges. It is specially fun to play together with your significant other or best friend, and in my case helped me and my wife find a game where we are both having fun while playing together. Since I usually play faster paced, more mechanic challenging games, my wife can not always play together. For us, gaming together usually is either too hard for her to keep up with everything goin on, or too slow/easy for me to be entertained.

As a side note, I really recommend the video from Razbuten: What Games Are Like For Someone Who Doesn’t Play Games, where he analyzes his wife (a non-gamer) trying out some games, and his thoughts on her evolution during this process. It really helped me realize how much I just intrinsically know about games, things that are not clear to others who do not play them since their childhood. There are some things, like controller mechanics or level design, that I just take for granted and natural, expecting others to either also know or believe they should be intuitively figured out.

Back to the topic, this was only partially the case with It Takes Two! Aside from some problems getting the timing of jumps/double jumps, and a lot of problems controlling her movement and her camera at the same time, everything else was just a blast for the both of us. My wife was very thrilled and brimming with excitement with a lot of what we faced. To our complete surprise, the depths to which this game could go seemed endless. In terms of random side-stories and completely different mechanics, it was extremely fun to experience this. Every time we thought “ok, now we can breathe, it will probably stabilize”, this roller coaster of a game would throw us around and completely change its style or setting, and always keep us amazed and basically anxious and curious about what could we expect next.

It basically was all over the place, in a good way! Are you into flying simulators / dog fighting? There is a stage for that. Would you prefer Street Fighter like duels? There is a very quick glimpse of that. Its range of areas or just quick scenarios would go on, and on, and on:

Not to mention the mini-games. Those were rather quick and just optional content, but also included quite a big range of mechanics: miniature car racing, whack-a-mole, tug of war, tank fighting, bull riding, etc. These were mostly just to create some animosity by putting you and your co-op partner to face each other for a few rounds. In general, we were just flabbergasted with the amount of content available.

The game was also heavily focused on interacting with things and blocking progress if both players are not co-operating. The amount of ideas that the design team had to come up with to keep it fresh and different, while also not demotivating or making the players feel like they are just stuck, is amazing.

Story

The story evolves around May and Cody, a couple that has decided to get a divorce. They tell Rose, their little girl, about it and she pretends everything is fine. Rose gets two dolls she had, resembling her father and mother, and plays with them as if they were making up and becoming friends again. As she cries during this and wishes that her parents relationship would be fixed, her tears hit the dolls and magic causes the real May and Cody to be embodied into the dolls, while their real bodies go into an unconscious trance.

May and Cody, now as dolls, have to figure out a way to get back to their real bodies. Dr. Hakim, a magically animated version of the “Book of Love” that Rose had, appears and tells them he will help them get back to their real bodies through fixing their relationship. At the beginning, they do not care for Dr. Hakim, do not intend to try and fix their relationship, and fight and argue a lot between themselves while trying to figure out what to do, and how to do it.

The game requires them to cooperate with each other in order to progress, taking them through different areas of their house, while making them remember beautiful or important moments of their history. The more they advance and try to ignore Dr. Hakim’s ideas and suggestions, the more they are reminded of the good times they had.

As the main story evolves, there are some side-stories being added that can be quite hilarious to be a part of. For example, when they are out in a tree in their garden, the couple gets trapped and captured by an army of squirrels led by a green camouflaged, battle-scarred, partially blinded, Squirrel Chief. The Chief is a very funny character, because he is pretty ruthless, serious, and has no mercy. He believes they are working for their enemies, the Wasps, and wants to kill them. May and Cody beg to not be killed, as they have nothing to do with Wasps, and just want to enter their house. To prove their innocence, The Chief tells them of an undercover agent, the Bumblebee, who was supposed to infiltrate the Wasps and take over their army by controlling a Robot Queen Wasp, but she had betrayed them and is now working with the Wasps while leading them in this war. May and Cody are required to assassinate the Wasp Queen in order to have their lives spared. It is just so unfathomably funny to me how we got to this stage, with things escalating so fast, that I could not help but just laugh through the whole thing in complete disbelief of what was going on.

At another part of the game, the couple believes that, since Rose’s tears brought them into this state, only making her cry again and bathe in her tears would revert the magic. This was hilarious in an “uncomfortable” way. They can not physically interact with her, and are invisible and inaudible to her, but she can still see the effects their actions have around her. So their plan is to hurt their daughter’s feelings in order to make her cry to solve their problem. This story is going in a “dark” direction, and they are so desperate that they do not seem to realize it. How do you think this is going to end? They decide to destroy one of Rose’s favourite toys, Cutie, an elephant plush, to achieve this. The couple goes through this Magical Castle, that in real life Cody helped Rose build to play, and discover that Cutie is actually the Queen of the Castle. They face challenges reaching out to the Queen, but eventually get there and reveal they plan to murder her to try and revert the magic affecting them. Obviously, Queen Cutie tries to escape, but is shot down, captured, and dragged to the edge of a cabinet to be thrown into her death. While trying to hold on to things and avoid being thrown, Queen Cutie gets continuously harmed, losing a leg and an ear, all the while begging not to be harmed. My wife was in complete disbelief at what she was being required to do, while I was just laughing out loud, partially due to the levels of nonsense going on, partially as a defense mechanism due to being nervous at how dark this was. One of those “well, I wish the game gave us a different way to go about this” situations. Finally, Cutie is thrown off the cliff and murdered. Rose cries, the couple bathes in their child’s tears, and it does not work. Well, who would have thought?

Back to the main story, Cody and May continuously learn to appreciate past moments and experiences they had, slowly being remembered of all the good things they did together, and realizing that they stopped giving enough attention to what was important in their relationship. Due to being ignored by her real parents (still unconscious), Rose assumes they are ignoring her because she is the root cause of their relationship’s troubles. She writes a farewell letter and leaves the house. May and Cody find the letter, but before they can read it, Dr. Hakim shreds it into four pieces, telling them that they will have to work and heal four different aspects of their relationship in order to get the pieces back. Reluctantly, but eventually covering all four aspects, the couple finally understand how much they mean to each other, and “heal” their relationship with a kiss. This breaks the curse, and they get sent back to their real bodies. They finally read the letter, where Rose says goodbye and lets them know she will not be bothering them anymore, and will take a bus far away. They run to the bus station and find her, explain that nothing was ever her fault, and reaffirming they will always love her, unconditionally. The game ends as they all walk home together.

Characters

Playable characters include:

May: a very smart, very goal oriented, focused woman. She likes to keep focus on things and gets annoyed when distracted
Cody: a funny character, with a few sarcastic comments thrown around here and there. A caring father, he loves nature and does not think twice to embrace chaos
Rose: we do not get to see too much of her. We see that she is broken by the divorce news, tries to give her parents some ideas of how to become friends again, but eventually runs away believing she was the root cause of all problems
Dr. Hakim: an “expert on love”, he is determined (partially by magic) to heal May & Cody’s relationship, as that was the wish made by Rose. Initially, could be seen as somewhat the antagonist, since he keeps getting into the way of the couple’s attempt to revert their “curse”. He is extremely extroverted, with an overly positive attitude, initially regarded as very annoying, but occasionally shows a more moderate side, with some insights that help the couple heal

Difficulty

For an experienced player, there is not much challenge here. The mechanics are straightforward, nothing is really super hidden, boss fights are mechanic based but also quite simple and intuitive. If you need hard thinking puzzles to solve, or very hard mechanical fights, you will not find it here. However, if you bring a non-gamer to be with a partner, which was my case, then everything is brought up a little harder, as they will have to face the real challenges. Particularly, I also liked to not spoil what was obvious to from the beginning, and let my wife figure stuff out by herself. I would only interrupt when I saw her frustration was raising too much, or becoming anger instead. Then I would also try to give tips and ideas to bring her on the right direction, instead of always just telling her what needs to be done.

This way, I feel like the game had its own different difficulty level for me and for her:

to me, it was about making sure that she was having fun and trying to handle everything that could be just too cumbersome, and let her deal with the puzzling and logic and come up with the ideas to solve the puzzles
to her, it was not only solving all of that, but also fighting the lack of mechanical control over the controller, which for her was the hardest challenge, by far

I guess it should be expected that, for a non-gamer, handling both sticks on the controller to get a character and camera moving in sync while having to keep up with a lot of other stuff going on (enemies flying, platforms moving, ground disappearing, lasers turning on and off, etc.), can be quite overwhelming. So, it is understandable that this would be a major challenge. But it also shows that the developers just wanted to make a great fun game, and not something strictly super challenging. Overall, the big challenge for my wife was definitely the camera.

Graphics

The art style is similar to some children animation movies, like Toy Story. The game has multiple, different environments, all of them quite huge and beautifully crafted. While overall being set in “regular” areas of the house, these areas are magically modified and so there is a lot of fantastical things around.

We get to experience electrical parts of the house, the internal parts of a tree and its underground area, sewers, a magical castle, the magical internal area of a pendulum clock, the magical area inside a snow globe, Rose’s play room, music room, etc. And this is just the general areas, not to mention different mini-areas or smaller parts of the game that take you to even further special, beautiful places, like the area similar to a Kaleidoscope.

Sound & Music

The voice acting was really great. The game has several dialogues, cutscenes, and other voiced moments that were very well done. The characters also kept poking fun at each other through multiple parts of the game, sometimes moved by story development, and sometimes by activating or interacting with game mechanics/objects.

The game had different settings and environments, and so the sounds and musics had to be adapted to match each new scenario. I overall had a blast, and some stages had such upbeat music, it was just made even more exciting to play.

Pros

Extremely fun
Amazingly varied content, with many styles and different things to do and see
Very good co-op setup and design
Funny dialogues and scenes, and even some nonsense side stories that were hilarious (or traumatizing)

Cons

For experienced gamers, there is pretty much no real difficulty or challenge
For non-gamers, handling the camera well can be quite hard. There are some configurations to help, but I think they depend a lot on who is playing and how well they handle the controller
If you only like part of the genres, you could be disappointed that the overall game focus is all over the place, and you do not really have a lot of time to enjoy each genre for too long, as they go by rather fast