I'm sorry.


It Takes Two has to be one of the most overrated games I've ever played. That doesn't mean I think it's bad. It's a perfectly fine game. But this thing was winning GotY awards and taking the gaming media by storm and I just don't get why. Maybe 2021 was a down year for gaming; feeling the full effects of the pandemic's impact on game development. Maybe it's because there's just a massive dearth of couch co-op games in a world of online play. Maybe it's because there are so few highly 'polished' (I use that term very lightly) multiplayer platformers. Whatever the reason, it's lost on me.

We'll start with the good. It Takes Two is a high budget graphically impressive co-op platformer where two divorcing parents are turned into dolls via their crying daughter's wish for them to 'be friends again.' The couple has to traverse a series of whimsical tasks in increasingly fantastical worlds based within household objects and areas. At its best It Takes Two provides clean crisp platforming and puzzle elements requiring satisfying cooperation between two players in very pretty environments. There are plenty of real winners in here.

The castle level is fantastic the whole way through. The brief top down Diablo style gameplay is really quite good and delightfully different from other parts of the game. The over the top harrowing murder of Cutie the Elephant is in all ways campy and surreal. It's horrifying and hysterical in equal measure and is one of the best bits of gaming I've ever had. The minigames interspersed throughout all of the levels is also a real treat. Almost all of them were quite fun, they took on quite the variety and they made for a really great game within the game. And as simple as it sounds, It Takes Two's control scheme does a lovely job. It all feels fluid, you never feel like you're fighting against the game's controls. It's also worth particular mention that while playing on PC each user can use a different controller type (PS4 vs Xbox) and still get the correct button glyphs on each side of the splitscreen, which is very, very useful.

But It Takes Two has a litany of problems that leave me confused as to its spot on game of the year lists. The biggest of which is the writing. The writing is downright terrible. The story is immensely shallow, hardly even surface deep at its best. The characters are extremely underdeveloped and scarcely even likable. May and Cody are routinely awful to one another even through to the end of the game. They show very little actual growth. The entire growth of their relationship comprises, at best, a handful of lines in the garden and stage levels. And even those are interrupted frequently by the same quibbling as the beginning of the game. Dr. Hakim should be winning awards for worst fictional depiction of a therapist in entertainment history and Rose is one of the worst written characters I've ever experienced in a video game.

The writing is bad, bad, bad. It is just full of lazy tropes and radically trivializes what goes into a divorce. "I bet you wouldn't get divorced if you tried harder." "Maybe your relationship could be nurtured better if you nurtured your literal backyard garden better." Just total silly shit. Not to mention that the entire process of them rekindling their relationship seemingly has stunningly little to do with what they actually like about one another and manages to have literally nothing to do with their child. Rose comes to the conclusion that her parents are divorcing because of her. Well the entire game takes place with Rose out of the picture. Which if anything lends credence to that idea! Just a bizarre writing choice.

Not only does the game take essentially no effort to actually explore the reasons why couples divorce and the complicated feelings of love and compatibility but it engages even less with how parenthood complicates these things. An even bigger sin to me is the repeated recycling of voicelines during the non-cinematic dialogue. You'll routinely hear May and Cody use the same voicelines for successes and failures which is just heartbreakingly dull given the radically different biomes and levels the characters are exploring.

The writing is absolutely dire but the game was littered with technical bugs. Tons of significant FPS drops as the game processed shader compilation. Routine crashes at startup, having to launch the game several times to actually play it. One complete BSoD crash. A quick Google shows thread after thread of other users with this same problem. Hell, I saw somebody with a thread on Reddit about how It Takes Two repeatedly hard crashed their PS5. The map geography is janky as hell which is annoying given how many game mechanics there are. In particular during the space level there's this mechanic where Cody can grow to immense size or shrink to a miniscule level. When shrinking, Cody can easily get stuck under, behind or inside of all types of map geography and objects. Once he's stuck there's no way to get unstuck. You can't self-destruct or reset. Meaning you have to restart from the last checkpoint. And this isn't something you have to particularly try to do either. While you're platform puzzle solving you're going to leap about and try to climb things and try to explore. You can get stuck in this pillow tower that looks climbable immediately after getting your shrinking ability and not be able to get out.

There are also several gameplay mechanic things that are unsatisfying. Plot threads that get dropped. When you first enter Cutie's Castle there's this whole cutscene with armed guards and a big head guard that looks different and scary. It completely telegraphs that there's gonna be a bossfight. But it never comes. You never see the big scary guard again. You meet a Jack in the Box who is quite friendly but your entire interaction lasts a single cutscene. It's nothing like meeting the squirrels or escaping the moles in the garden. Or even freeing Joy. Just a wasted opportunity. The entire snowglobe village is beyond dead and lifeless even after you ring the bells to break the ice and warm it up. It's still cold and desolate and no particularly engaging really in any form.

Why are there no collectibles? It's a platformer! There are the minigames, and they are splendid. But then there's a litany of little items or seeming tasks all over the maps that do nothing when you interact with them. in the garden there's an area with a finite amount of specifically placed moldy apples. If you bound them or hit them they explode. Why is there no reward or even neat little sound effect that plays if you squish them all? Why put them there and make them interactable? It doesn't need to be grand. It could just be a small noise or flag that pops up or anything. Like how the only reward for the Helltower was a fireworks cannon. Which was cool enough.

And there are more of these instances. The bells in the clock, the glass bottles in the toy room, the pumpkins in the garden. I don't get the idea of a co-op platformer with 0 collectibles. Odd, odd decision. Especially when there were several opportunities for them as is? It felt like cut content. Also, what the hell was with the entire sex/orgasm allegory in the spa? Weird as hell.

In the end I really felt like what made It Takes Two was the gameplay and only the gameplay. And only fun to the extent that playing any game with your buds can be fun. The combat was great, usually. The maps were very pretty. And solving puzzles was a lot of fun. But I would have just as much fun playing Project Zomboid, Mario Party or Human Fall Flat with my buds too. That's not something unique to It Takes Two. It was competent in those regards and it was fun. I did enjoy it quite a bit. But it was worlds away from breathtaking or groundbreaking. It was a very poor story with fun gameplay buried under really unacceptable technical problems.

To make a comparison to a game that I just recently finished, It Takes Two was all gameplay and zero redeeming story while What Remains of Edith Finch was all story and almost zero actual gameplay. I'd still sooner return to Edith Finch than It Takes Two.

It's not a game I regret playing. I scored it a 3.5 after all. Just given the hype I was expecting this to be a slamdunk 5/5 and it wasn't.

7/10

This game is a rarety in modern times, what do you mean the one game that won GOTY 2021 is a co-op stylized adventure that tells a very good and competent story about a couple reigniting their love for each other?

Now i do feel that the first 3 to 4 hours of the game drag a little bit until it actualy starts advancing the story foward, and that the game is so scripted in what the players must do that exists zero creativity in how to pass each puzzle, but this are some minor issues that aren't even issues, the game exceeds in it's proposal and was very fun from beggining to end.