It Takes Two: A Masterpiece of Co-op Gaming That Redefines Togetherness
My girlfriend and I played It Takes Two over three weekends. We finished it on a Sunday afternoon and she immediately said “that was the best game I’ve ever played” and then went quiet for about a minute and I knew the ending hit her harder than she wanted to admit in front of me. I’m not going to lie, I was also pretending I wasn’t affected. I was. We sat there watching the credits while our controllers just sat on the couch and neither of us said anything for a while because what do you say after a game about fixing a marriage when you’re a couple who just spent fifteen hours actively working together to fix a digital one.
That’s the thing about It Takes Two. It’s not subtle. It is aggressively about communication and compromise and meeting someone halfway. And somehow it works because instead of telling you those things it makes you do them, over and over, in increasingly ridiculous ways that range from “this is fun” to “I am going to throw this controller if you don’t jump on the mushroom right now.”
The Part Where It’s Actually About a Divorce
Cody and May are getting a divorce. Their daughter Rose made two clay dolls of them and cried on them and now they’re trapped inside the dolls. I need to acknowledge that the setup is kind of weird and on paper it sounds like a Hallmark movie premise that someone at Hazelight pitched during a meeting where everyone was pretending to take notes. But the execution is genuine. The way the story unfolds through each chapter by making you confront different aspects of a failing relationship through gameplay is not something I’ve seen done this well before. The garden chapter where they’re dealing with neglected growth. The snow globe chapter where they literally cannot communicate because their voices freeze. I played the snow chapter and turned to my girlfriend and said “this is uncomfortably accurate” and she just nodded.
The writing has this quality where Cody and May start out as the kind of bickering couple that’s exhausting to watch and by the end you’re rooting for them in a way that feels earned. Not because they suddenly become nice people. They don’t. May is still kind of intense about everything and Cody still has that energy where he thinks he’s being supportive but is actually just avoiding the real issue. They’re both kind of annoying in realistic ways and that’s what makes it work.
The Gameplay Keeps Changing And I Have Feelings About That
Every single chapter introduces a completely new mechanic. Not a variation of the last one. A completely different game. In the tree chapter one person controls the tree and the other person flies around on a squirrel suit and I’m not making that up. In the space chapter you’re flying a spaceship together and one person shoots and one person steers and if you’ve ever tried to coordinate anything with another human being you can imagine how that goes. In the music chapter you’re playing instruments and the rhythm section is both of you trying to match timing and I have never felt more judged by a video game in my life.
The thing I respect most is that none of these mechanics outstay their welcome. Just when you start to get comfortable with one thing the game takes it away and gives you something new. Some people find this frustrating and I understand that argument. You spend time learning a mechanic and then boom, gone. But for me the constant reinvention is what kept the whole thing from getting stale. Fifteen hours is a long time for a co-op game and the variety is the reason I never once looked at my phone to check the time.
The mini-games deserve a special mention. Hidden throughout every chapter are these competitive mini-games where you fight each other instead of working together. My girlfriend destroyed me at every single one. The tug of war one, the chess one, the one where you shoot each other on the moon. I won one mini-game total across the entire playthrough and I think she felt bad about how much she was winning so she let me have it but I’ll take it. Those moments of competition broke up the cooperation in a way that felt natural and gave us things to argue about that weren’t real, which is a nice break from arguing about real things.
The Parts That Drove Me Nuts
Not everything is perfect. Some puzzles are the kind where you know what to do but the execution requires both players to be precise at the same time and that is asking a lot when one of you is me and the other is someone who refuses to read the on-screen instructions because “I’ll figure it out.” There’s a section with magnets where we died probably twenty times and by the fifteenth time I was not having fun anymore I was just determined to not be the one who messed it up first. The game has a skip option for difficult sections and I’m told some people used it but we didn’t because that felt like admitting defeat and we had a reputation to maintain with each other. I don’t know who we were maintaining it for but it mattered at the time.
The dialogue can get repetitive when you’re stuck on a puzzle. You hear the same line from Cody or May over and over while you’re trying to figure out the solution and after the sixth repetition it stops being charming and starts being an endurance test. Also the game requires a co-op partner. There is no single-player mode. This is by design and I respect it but it means if you don’t have someone to play with you literally cannot play the game. The Friend’s Pass helps but it’s still a barrier. I almost didn’t play it because I couldn’t find anyone for two months.
Josef Fares and the Oscars
I need to mention Josef Fares because he’s the director and he went on stage at The Game Awards and said some stuff about the Oscars that I’m not going to repeat but it was memorable. The man makes co-op games and nothing else. His previous game was A Way Out which was also co-op and also good but not this good. He has a vision and it’s specifically about two people on the same couch yelling at each other and I respect the commitment to the bit. He’s the kind of director who would rather make one game perfectly than five games adequately and I think the industry needs more people like that.
The Ending
I can’t talk about the ending in detail because it matters that you experience it. What I can say is that the last chapter asks both players to make a choice and the way that choice plays out is handled with a gentleness that caught me off guard. I expected something bigger. More dramatic. A boss fight or a climactic set piece. Instead it’s quiet and small and about the two characters finally just being honest with each other. I’ve played games with better combat and better graphics and better everything technical. I have not played a game that understood its own premise better than this one does. It says it’s about a couple repairing their marriage and it actually delivers on that promise from start to finish without losing the thread once. That’s rare. Most games with strong premises fall apart in the third act. This one doesn’t.
My girlfriend still brings it up sometimes. Random moments. We’ll be doing dishes or whatever and she’ll say something like “remember the toolbox level” and laugh. That’s probably the highest compliment I can give a game. It became something we share. Not just something we played. Fifteen hours of jumping on mushrooms and flying spaceships and shooting each other on the moon and now it’s just a thing between us. I don’t know how to rate that. I’m not going to rate it.
