Not intentionally playtesters would inevitably want to play with their partner. Fares said Hazelight brought couples in to playtest the game. Players constantly must exercise prosocial relationship behavior to play effectively. It Takes Two isn’t a deep game, but it is a telling one. Players rehearse a steady “ one, two, three” every half hour. Let’s make the players talk.” As one player plummets down a slide, the other is forced to remove barriers (printed with cute animals) that only the first player can see and call out. “It’s not just a game where it’s about love, so we made mechanics out of that,” he says. As any couple’s therapist would tell you, c o-lab-or-ation means communication. It happens on a higher level than the metaphor-puzzles the game excels at. What makes It Takes Two work, in his eyes, is the union between story and game. He gamely said it may have entered into It Takes Two subconsciously. Rose is what binds them, first and foremost. Once Cody and May traverse the snowy mountain where they had their first ski trip, all contained within a small mantleside snowglobe, Rose takes it between her two hands and peers in. After her parents fight tooth-and-nail through a level designed after a given household object, Rose, a titan compared to her doll parents, will almost always thoughtlessly pick it up. What looms large, literally, over squabbles of all proportions is the couple’s daughter Rose. What if instead of struggling to measure up on scales large and small, Cody and May redefine what time means for them? “In the ‘therapy levels,’ as I call them,” says Fares, “we use the mechanics to talk about their specific problems in their relationship, which I think are universal: passion, giving time to each other, and attraction.” The big clock governs them.
A magical, Puss-in-Boots-voiced relationship therapy book coaches the couple along (and antagonizes them), yelling co-lab-or-ation! every chance he gets. “For some narrative experiences, we should include mechanics as part of the storytelling,” says Fares. And so if Cody doesn’t paint the wasp’s nest with nectar, May can’t explode it and neither of them can continue on.
#It takes two elephant full
“We use a lot of metaphors through mechanics,” says Josef Fares, founder of It Takes Two developer Hazelight Studios.Īs Cody and May battle through maximized portions of their home, like the squirrel-run military base occupying their tree, they continually receive complementary and contrasting abilities-like a gun full of flammable nectar and a match-shooter. Pushing aside the sad reality that few AAA video games take love as their subject, It Takes Two does more than be about love. It is only playable by two people, either online or together in the same room. Its greatest success, though, is its perfect synergy between plot and play. Each one of the never-ending stream of new gameplay loops feels good, never forced or unwieldy. Delightful details, from ’90s dentist shop toys to anthropomorphic vacuums, fill each level. First and most importantly, it is uncommonly fun, satisfying, and innovative-perhaps clearing the high bar Portal 2 set for co-op games. The staging ground for their relationship squabbles has grown from a petri dish to the cosmos.
Above and below the glass floor is infinity. The background suddenly shifts from “Mommy space” to galactic space. As they venture deeper, more space-themed toys appear: Discovery Store-style plasma balls, a hanging solar system mobile. “Cause you’re always working,” Cody retorts. To return to their properly proportioned lives, May and Cody climb through the cushions.Ĭody banters: “Rose calls it ‘Mommy space,’ ya know, as in ‘outer space.’” May says she didn’t know that. The floor, which winds on forever, is stacked tall with pillows many times their size. It’s not two dining chairs with a draped-blanket roof.
In the new co-op game It Takes Two, May and her husband Cody, who have been transformed into tiny dolls, crawl through the pillow fort she built for their daughter Rose. Small transgressions are metonymic, stand-ins for the real issues: gendered housework expectations your partner stumbling home at midnight from god knows which club how damn indecisive they are about everything. At the same time, love is the destroyer of scale. “I don’t know, what do you want for dinner?” Fighting material. In long-term relationships, it’s always the small things.
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