Adding to the list of "co-op only" (or borderline) games I have comes A Way Out, the first game by Hazelight Studios, played with u/Nowhere. Heavy spoilers in last two paragraphs before closing thoughts.

A Way Out starts so strong that the eventual watering itself down and throwing its hands up is just immensely disappointing to me. What I mean by watering itself down is how at the beginning you're tasked left and right with synchronized events that likely require a degree of communication during the Prison Act, but every point immediately past that never brings it back. It starts with requiring the two players to keep an eye out for guards patrolling while removing a toilet, then for distracting guards to get through the wash rooms, climbing the shaft, and finally taking down two guards at the same time on The Way Out. There's a couple driving sections where someone drives and the other shoots off the back, and while technically the driver can influence the gunner, they may as well be separate experiences. The only driving section that's "different" from this is both players driving a motorbike, and if you're new to both film magic and video games, the way the game "synchronizes" the stunts might be somewhat impressive if not for the really obvious (imo) slowdown of the bikes to do so on the ramps leading up to those sections. Sometimes I was early, sometimes I was late, but we met at the same time because one of us would magically slow down because Josef Fares told the game programmers to make a co-op Uncharted sequence.

A little before this the game also pretends the intro to the third act has another double guard takedown, and much to our amusement, Nowhere was able to just walk up to both of them and melee them as they flop into ragdolls; this is also where the game becomes a bad third person shooter with QTEs designed never to fail unless you put your controller down and walk away (though even then the game will often let the players sit there uninterrupted indefinitely if they so choose). That was the last instance the game "tried" to make us work together, but it seemed to have forgotten that it was ever about interesting puzzle design and flavor that comes with this style of game.

The story is atrocious, to the point where I think if it was smarter it'd be satirizing high stakes buddy films like Brother (2000) or The Raid 2 (2014); unfortunately, a bit like watching an old friend with a particular brand of humor still pedaling over a decade later, you realize they're not being ironic about it and the dread seeps in. Vincent is just generally abhorrent and Leo is a marginally more likeable absentee father who has the know-how to evade the entirety of the U.S. police force but can't communicate with his wife about anything. Actually neither can Vincent, and both their wives seem to exist only as pieces for them to make us feel bad for Vincent and Leo, instead I now realize that realistically Carol told him to screw off because he's a pig cop bootlicker and Linda-- actually we don't really know much about her other than she stole cigs and ice cream with Leo when they were kids. The hospital scene is hilarious to me, I don't know when this game is supposed to take place but in what state do they not ID check people asking to go into the maternity ward?? They just let these two complete strangers walk in, then a couple minutes later police show up. The escape from the hospital is also just comically bad, a cop practically stares at Vincent but because Vincent played Hitman (2016) he's like "I'll sit on this bench and I'll look like a patient." and it works cus I guess they just send 10 cars after em but not 1 cop even bothers to check faces? lol

The choice to present most of the story in this sort of "recollected" way with the two on the plane is also frankly kind of trash. I'm not opposed to this style of writing, but it takes a lot of the weight out of the entire first half of the game when their current whereabouts are that obvious. The latter half the of the game is a joke and the "twist" is dogwater. I don't find the fact that Vincent reveals himself to still be a bootlicker cop and "will lower Leo's sentence to be a bro" endearing in the slightest, Leo is 100% in the right then to be fucking pissed and it's mind boggling to me that the game is trying to put them on the same pedestal by then. Making the players do PvP to decide the "ending" is also drawn out and both Leo and Vincent are really tanky for some reason, which doesn't even matter because the deciding factor is a QTE that's just mashing one button anyways. Vincent's ending in particular I find gross; in the ending where Leo dies, Vincent tells Linda... something, we don't know what because writing a human interaction is the hardest thing in this game; then just goes back home and it's supposed to be a happy ending where because he was this deceitful and will likely never tell Carol he offed a dude, his resignation from the bureau makes Carol go "..." "Gonna come inside?" like why does she trust him at all? Does she not know she'd get his pension benefits anyways? LOL the women in this game are all written like flat boards, deceitful or untrustworthy. The men in it are too tbf, but the difference is the women here are a background accessory and the men have more dialogue in one-off conversations at the prisons than any of the women do across the whole game LOL (besides Linda maybe) In Leo's ending, he follows through and gives the letter Vincent wrote to Carol (albeit in an invisible man sort of way), before dipping to be off grid with Linda and their son Alex.

With all that out of the way. the one bright side is it doesn't glorify prison systems, and the farmstead is hilarious and where the game peaked before slowly burning down and crashing. A Way Out still merits a play for this style of co-op alone, the actual gameplay isn't "terrible" but it's mind numbing and the story takes itself way too seriously to ever be in a "so bad it's good" territory (except the fact QTEs can rewind some events, that's hilarious; remember that Marvel game clip that went around with Thor's hammer? Imagine that, for the CLIMAX of the game.). I can see a lot of the groundwork for It Takes Two was laid out here, but unlike this, It Takes Two remembers it's supposed to be a co-op game with variety and constant gameplay shifts to keep things fresh instead of being a glorified, bootleg Uncharted-in-parallel. It is in my mind, the epitome of Video Game Writing (bad, not endearing, not quirky, frankly gross, etc.)