By MaJ — Gaming systems analyst with 18+ years of industry experience. Full bio
Why does a game about divorce work better as a co-op experience than every dedicated couples’ therapy app on the market?
It Takes Two won Game of the Year at The Game Awards 2021, beating Deathloop, Resident Evil Village, Metroid Dread, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, and Psychonauts 2. It also took home Best Multiplayer and Best Family Game. Hazelight Studios achieved all of this with roughly 35 people and a development budget that would barely cover a AAA game’s marketing line item. There is no single-player mode. You cannot play it alone.
That last fact is not a limitation. It is the entire point.
Most games tell you a story between the gameplay. You shoot things, run through corridors, collect items, and the cutscenes carry the emotional weight. It Takes Two does something different: the mechanics themselves are the story. Every puzzle you solve with another person is not just a gameplay moment—it is a deliberate argument about how relationships actually work. The game does not explain this. It does not need to. By the time you finish Chapter 2 trying to grow a tree together, one player watering while the other channels sunlight, you understand exactly what the game is saying: growth requires coordinated effort. One person cannot do it alone. You can fail by caring too little. You can also fail by caring in the wrong way.
That chapter alone teaches more about relationships than most self-help books. And you did not read a word of it.
Nine Chapters, Nine Different Games
It Takes Two is not one game played nine times. It is nine different games that share characters and a through-line. Each chapter introduces a mechanic that did not exist in the previous chapter and will not exist in the next. Chapter 1 is platforming—the two players move through the same space, often at different speeds, navigating obstacles that one player cannot clear alone. Chapter 2 swaps that entirely: a tree-growth puzzle where both players must perform complementary roles simultaneously, one watering, one providing light. Chapter 3 introduces a hammer and a floating platform, and suddenly one player becomes the builder while the other navigates what the builder creates.
None of these chapters look like each other. They do not feel like reskins of a template. They feel like a game designer who ran out of patience for repetition and simply built something new every few hours. This is remarkable in a commercial release. Most studios reuse mechanics to reduce risk. Hazelight Studios apparently decided that risk was the point.
The Magnet Chapter: Push and Pull
Chapter 4 runs on magnet physics. One player attracts, the other repels, and both must time their pulls and pushes in sequence to advance. The design lesson here is not subtle: pulling and pushing are both necessary, and both can cause harm depending on context. Chapter 5 does something even stranger—it introduces snow globes that let the two players communicate by playing notes in sync. There is no chat function. No voice call. You and your partner must feel out each other’s timing with no verbal coordination at all. The game deliberately removes the one tool real couples rely on most heavily, and the result is a chapter where good intentions are not enough. You have to actually be in sync.
The Spacecraft Chapter: Trust Made Mechanical
Chapter 6 puts one player in charge of steering a spacecraft while the other shoots. This is trust made mechanical. The driver cannot shoot. The shooter cannot drive. The person with the controller cannot control the outcome. They can only trust the person who can. This is a fairly precise description of what marriage asks of people, and the game makes no speech about it. It just hands you the controller.
The Asymmetry That Makes It Work
Here is the thing about co-op games: they have a natural failure mode called the carry problem. One player is better, faster, or more experienced, and the other player becomes a passenger—present for the ride but not meaningfully contributing. This destroys the experience for both parties. The good player gets bored. The bad player feels useless. The co-op fantasy collapses.
It Takes Two eliminates the carry problem structurally. The game is asymmetric: Cody has physical tools and strength; May has magical abilities. These are not equal skill sets—they are different skill sets. In practice, this means that in any given puzzle, one player has the tools to lead and one has the tools to support. But the lead changes. Over nine chapters, the balance shifts constantly.
The game does not feel balanced because it is enforcing equality. It feels balanced because each chapter’s specific mechanics happen to create balance. That is a much harder design problem, and it is what makes It Takes Two impressive at the systems level.
Josef Fares’ Design Philosophy
Josef Fares directed Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons before It Takes Two. Brothers made you control two characters simultaneously—one with each analog stick. Your hands had to do different things at the same time, and the physical act of coordination produced an emotional investment that no dialogue could have manufactured. When Fares won Best Independent Game at The Game Awards 2013 and said “F*** the Oscars” on stage, people thought it was theater. It was not. It was a design philosophy in four words.
Fares has now made three games. All three are co-op only. There is no single-player mode in any of them. This is not a commercial decision—co-op games reach smaller audiences than solo games by a significant margin. It is a philosophical decision. The argument the game is making cannot be delivered through any other structure. Brothers needed the physical act of dual-stick control. A Way Out needed two people locked in the same prison escape. It Takes Two needs two people navigating the same relationship. Remove the co-op requirement and you remove the meaning.
This is also why the planned film and TV adaptation faces an almost interesting problem. The argument It Takes Two makes, it makes through what you do with your hands. You cannot translate that to dialogue or cinematography. Not because those media are inferior, but because they are different. A therapist can tell you that relationships require coordinated effort. It Takes Two makes you do it, with your actual hands, in real time, against a puzzle that does not care whether you meant well.
The Final Chapter: Simplicity as Statement
The last chapter of It Takes Two asks both players to make a simultaneous choice. Both players must press the action button within about half a second of each other. There is no enemy. There is no timer counting down on screen. There is no spectacle. There is just a moment that requires you to be doing the same thing at the same time, with the person you have been doing everything else with for the last eight to twelve hours.
It is the most understated final challenge in the history of Game of the Year winners. It is also the most honest. The game has spent nine chapters teaching you to synchronize, trust each other’s timing, communicate without words, and carry each other’s weight when one of you cannot lead. The final test is not a boss. It is a question: did you learn any of that? Are you still here, together, able to choose the same thing at the same moment?
The Game Awards gave It Takes Two a trophy. The game had already given itself something harder to earn.