Welcome to my Big Pissy Essay about It Takes Two, the 2021 two-player co-op 3D platforming title from Swedish developer Hazelight Studios. This essay will be one part review, one part gameplay retrospective, and one part an exercise in game/narrative design. You can find my previous post about It Takes Two here.

Short-form spoiler-free review: It Takes Two is a scattershot mishmash of 3D platforming mechanics which, while attractively presented, come too fast and furious to ever remain reliably fun for long. Its lazy, comedically-bereft writing and vacuous narrative design completely squander the potential of its premise. This is a game by, about, and for people without true internality.

Full essay, complete with spoilers, below! CW for discussion of a cartoonish-but-nevertheless-unsettling torture scene.

(Addendum after writing the first two segments: wow, this sucker is turning out to be a lot longer than I envisioned! Fuck! Piss! I'm going to call it a night and post this first bit and then add to it using reblogs later on. Sorrymasen)

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A quick word about structure: this essay will go element-by-element through the game's plot, narrative framing devices, and characters, providing a description of each as they appear in the game as it exists, explaining their various shortcomings, and finishing by offering my take on how they could have been done better. I'm not going to be discussing the game's mechanics or graphics in any terms other than how they apply to (and are frequently failed by) the game's narrative.

With that said, let's begin with

The Plot

Summary

(First portion copy-pasted from my previous post.) It Takes Two's story centers on a pair of young parents, stay-at-home dad Cody and overworked engineer May, who are on the verge of divorce. The game begins when they inform their young daughter, Rose, of the impending split, prompting Rose to inadvertently cast a spell using a magic book that traps her parents' souls in a clay doll (Cody) and a wooden doll (May). In doll form, Cody and May are accosted repeatedly by magical self-help book Dr. Hakim, a capricious, mildly-racist-caricature trickster god who subjects Cody and May to repeated whimsical torments in order to fix their marriage.

The game's first four levels focus on Cody and May largely ignoring Dr. Hakim in order to reach Rose, who they assume will be able to break the spell they're under. When it becomes clear that she cannot, Dr. Hakim essentially abducts the pair for the game's final four levels, which are sort of a disjointed procession of unconnected levels loosely themed around the worst relationship advice you've ever heard in your life.

At the end of the 8th level, Cody and May kiss and the spell is broken. Returning to their human bodies, they realize that Rose blames herself for the divorce and is planning on running away from home. They easily catch her and the game ends with it being implied (albeit not explicitly confirmed) that Cody and May are going to remain married.

Shortcomings

It may seem to readers who have not played It Takes Two that the above three paragraphs are unfairly short on details. I promise you that they are not. Beating this game took me & my friend about 15 hours, and in that time Cody and May did not experience any character growth or accomplish anything of note besides jogging the 300 feet to where their daughter is waiting for a bus to take her into Hell.

The greatest crime of It Takes Two's story is that it is DEATHLY afraid of providing specific details. Neither Cody or May ever specifically say why they want to divorce, apart from Cody being unhappy that May is at work more than she's at home. We never learn what either of them want out of a successful marriage. We don't know what they plan to do after the divorce. Neither of them seem to have any plans for what will happen to their daughter in the divorce. Most real divorces are built from a thousand thousand petty slights and long-harbored grudges - none of that is on display between Cody and May, whose bickering consists mainly of vague digs.

The obvious problem here is that without specific details to confront each other with, Cody and May have no chance of ever moving past their resentment. Any attempt the game makes at showing Cody and May as having rekindled their love ultimately falls flat because we simply don't know what they've managed to overcome besides 15 hours of easy jumping puzzles. The overall impression I got from the story was that it would have been better for them to get divorced, if only because neither of them seemed to be getting anything out of their marriage.

Solutions

This is something I'm going to expand on more when I talk about the specific characters, but the broad, overarching solution to the story's shortcomings is that Cody and May must begin the game as explicitly shitty, selfish people who are made explicitly better through the trials they endure.

Further, a much more original and interesting end to the game would be Cody and May realizing that divorce is still the best option - but instead of them simply sliding into it because they've given up, they realize that they need to show their daughter that it's important to make painful decisions that are better in the long run.

The Levels & Framing Devices

Summary

As I mentioned above, It Takes Two has 8 main levels split roughly into two groups of 4. They are as follows:

• The Workshop: Cody and May awaken into their puppet bodies and meet Dr. Hakim, who nearly gets them killed by a vengeful vacuum cleaner. Gimmicks in this level include traveling via vacuum tubes and playing with a hammer and some magic nails.
• The Tree: Cody and May make their way down, in, and around the world's biggest fucking tree, getting recruited by an army of squirrels to assassinate a robot wasp queen, then fleeing the squirrels after they refuse to carry out their mission. Gimmicks include a sticky sap shooter/flamethrower combo, as well as a beetle riding segment.
• The Space Station: Cody and May reach Rose's bedroom but are zapped into a weird liminal space by Moon Baboon, one of Rose's childhood toys that doesn't want Cody and May to make Rose cry. Cody and May basically savage Moon Baboon until he agrees to let them go. Gimmicks include shrinking/growing for Cody and gravity boots for May.
• The Castle: Cody and May decide they need to destroy Rose's favorite toy in order to make her cry, which involves scaling a giant toy castle and torturing the fuck out of a struggling, pleading stuffed elephant. This level is fucking jam-PACKED with gimmicks, including a mine cart, dinosaurs, fidget spinner gliders, and a sword-and-sorcery dungeon crawling segment.
• The Clockwork Town: After their brutal torture of a defenseless creature fails to yield any results, Dr. Hakim teleports Cody and May into another weird liminal space to begin a focused campaign of indoctrination. He incentivizes the couple by giving them pieces of a letter Rose was writing, which they think contains the cure for their condition (it does not). Each level after this point is loosely themed around a piece of Dr, Hakim's terrible relationship advice, and technically takes place within a specific item or location within the house. The relationship advice for this level is "you have to be aware of your partner's relationship to time" (May considers her time precious, while Cody has a more lackadaisical attitude), and it takes place inside an antique cuckoo clock. Gimmicks include a time-reversing pocket watch for Cody and cloning powers for May, as well as some fairly cute clockwork birds.
• The Snowy Mountain: The relationship advice for this level is "you need to be attracted to your partner" and it takes place within a snowglobe that Cody and May got during the alpine ski trip on which Cody proposed. Gimmicks include Cody and May both having one half of a magnet, along with an inexplicable underwater segment. This level was actually pretty fun.
• The Garden: The relationship advice for this level is "Cody needs to rediscover his passion for gardening", which he abandoned because May didn't encourage him to do it enough (I will have more thoughts on this when I discuss Cody, trust me), and takes place, obviously, in Cody's long-abandoned garden. Gimmicks include Cody becoming a weird seed man who can turn into a plant while May gets some shears and a FLUDD-like apparatus for spraying water. There's also a sexy plant lady.
• The Attic: The relationship advice for this level is "Now May needs to rediscover her passion for singing" and takes place in the attic, centered largely around May's old record player. For gimmicks, Cody gets a single cymbal that he uses as a Captain-America-style shield, while May gets a magical singing voice. The vibes in this level are atrocious. This is also the last level in the game, after which Cody and May have their story-ending kiss.

Shortcomings

I have three primary criticisms of the level structure as it pertains to the game's narrative.

First, the first package of 4 levels, which primarily concern Cody and May attempting to reach and influence Rose, could easily be pared down by half to 2. It is, frankly, insane to spend fully half of your game's story essentially getting your characters from point A to point B before you start actually examining their relationship.

Second, having Dr. Hakim magically teleport Cody and May to wherever they need to go next is a MAJOR missed opportunity to have the house serve as a hub world.

Thirdly, it's obvious that the relationship advice is a hamfisted afterthought meant to fit whatever gimmick the developers wanted to build a level around.

A fourth sub-criticism is that these are seriously the dumbest, least helpful pieces of relationship advice and I hate looking at them so much.

Solutions

This game immediately becomes a thousand times cooler if we get to the house within 2 levels and then after that the house's interior serves as a Banjo-Kazooie-type hubworld. Rather than being spoonfed a point of relationship conflict by Hakim, Cody and May can surface points of conflict naturally simply by moving from room to room. Think about all the things that the kitchen can represent to a married couple - dirty dishes left in the sink overnight, food preferences, grocery spending, the list goes on and on and on. Traveling to the living room gives rise to conflict over leisure activities. Moving out into the yard brings up abandoned hobbies. And, just, like, the BEDROOM COME ON. This would have the knock-on benefit of allowing players to tackle each level in whatever order they please.

I would also personally abandon the framing device of the torn-up letter and stick with the perfectly-serviceable device of Cody and May attempting to get Rose's attention by influencing objects throughout the house (did I mention that for some magic reason Rose cannot see, hear, or feel Cody or May in their doll forms? She can't! It's dumb!) This is already basically what happens in the game anyways (finishing the cuckoo clock level causes the cuckoo clock in the real world to start chiming, and so on) and the letter never feels like anything more than a vestigial bit of narrative jetsam.

(TO BE CONTINUED BELOW. THIS MOTHERFUCKER IS ALMOST 2000 WORDS ALREADY AND IT'S PAST MIDNIGHT.)