As @TheChicken has posted about before, me and him have been playing and finished It Takes Two. Going into it, I knew very little about the game, aside from the fact that it seemed to win the game of the year from The Game Awards in 2021 almost out of nowhere. And indeed, looking at the Wikipedia page, Amazon is apparently trying to turn the game into a movie, with Dwayne Johnson producing it and possibly starring in it. That’ll be interesting if that sees the light of day.
So we started playing this online, which thankfully was quite stable 90% of the time despite us living on different contintents. It Takes Two is a third person co-op title, with you mostly doing platforming, puzzle solving, as well as the occasional shooting, as you have to work together to progress. You play as either May or Cody, a couple in their 30’s with a daughter on the brink of divorce. When their daughter overhears them talking about their impending divorce, and cries over a couple of dolls, the couple are seemingly transferred from their real bodies to that of dolls only a few inches high. And with the appearance of a sentient love therapy book, the couple are urged to work together and to mend their relationship so that they can return to their real bodies.
The plot is fairly thin. May, Cody, and their daughter Rose are arguably more like archetypes rather than fully fleshed out characters. May is the breadwinner of the house, constantly at work leading to Rose to miss her alot and for Cody to grow a bit of resentment at her, whilst Cody is the stay at home Dad whose lost his passion for gardening and is an a bit of an aimless spot in his life. We never actually find out what May even does for a living (especially to support a spouse and daughter in a very nice detached family home next to the riverside), or ever too many details about their lives or pasts. The story is that of a couple that, through neither’s own fault, has lost the passion in their relationship, and need to find it again.
I enjoy this plot, although as @TheChicken did point out, I’m not entirely sure where this game is aimed at. Cutesy plot and simple to understand graphics, but swearing, some odd bits of darkness and violence. Not a bad thing, I guess for kids a story about the parents forced to go through a journey is perhaps not really for them. Wonder if the Amazon movie will sanitize some elements. And I will admit, it does bug me that the nature of the transformation or the worlds May and Cody find themselves in are never really explained. Like, they’re shrunk but it’s not like Honey I Shrunk the Kids, it’s that everyday objects and items either gain sentience or have exagerrated layouts to provide the levels you run about it in, but this isn’t a seperate dimension, it is still established they are still in the normal world, and can influence the real world in some ways but are also invisible to real people. I don’t get the rules, but frankly, I don’t think you’re meant to. You’re meant to go with the flow the story and whatever worlds and set pieces come up, and frankly, I think that’s fine. It Takes Two doesn’t have my favourite story or anything, but the fact it is such a well designed game, has great music, great looking worlds, and the fact that May, Cody, and the book have such great voice actors really carries the entire thing.
As for the game, well, I really enjoy it. The game is split across 7 chapters, each, providing their own gimmicks and unique gameplay opportunities. The game’s co-op is asymetrical, while May and Cody control the same on a basic level with the same speed, jump etc, they will each often be given different abilities from each other and different gameplay segments from each other. Stuff like getting opposites polarity of a magnet, getting different types of wasp killing guns, May getting to use a piercing scream whilst Cody gets Captain America’s shield etc. I played as May and I can imagine going back to the game in a few years and replaying as Cody.
I think it’s the variety that astounds me. The game is constantly changing things up, in terms of setting, gimmicks, set pieces etc. I could easily see a more cynical company getting rid of half the levels in this game, and doubling the length of the levels left in this game and calling it a day, at the risk of putting fatigue in the players and more chance of players being in a segment they don’t like doing. I think the quality of stuff you do is almost always great, and the few bits I wasn’t too hot on never lasted long enough to be an issue. Really my only memorable negative experience is a boss fight in the clocktower, since that was a boss we got stuck on for a while, and even then, that was mainly due to a part I had to do regarding timing, where it seemed the game needed me to jump at an almost frame perfect point.
Otherwise though, this game is very well designed, and is a lot of fun. I highly recommend it for you and a friend, whether through online or co-op. I will definetly be looking forward to playing Hazelight’s previous game, A Way Out, at some point. At the moment, me and @TheChicken have started diving into the We Were Here series, a series of 2 player first player co-op games. We played the 5th game, Expeditions, then the 1st game, and plan to resume with the second game once Chicken gets some time to get his Alan Wake 2 and Spider-Man 2 fixings. We Were Here 1 and We Were Here Expeditions: The FriendShip are both bite sized affairs, each can be completed in one sitting, whilst I believe the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th games are far meatier affairs. Will be nice to talk about them once we play more of this series.
I also played the new DLC for Sonic Frontiers. I don’t have too much to say. The positive: all the DLC for Frontiers has been released for free, including stuff like a photo mode, additional content in the main campaign, a juke box featuring music from a ton of other Sonic games including some real deep cuts, and a few quality of life improvements. The last DLC just came out, called New Horizons, is essentially an expansion pack. In New Horizons, you get to play as Tails, Knuckles, and Amy. This is pretty fun, although really it does feel like more of a proof of concept for a sequel since there isn’t much you can do with them, you’re limited to one island with them and a bunch of challenges each characters only they can do, and some optional enemies to fight, but otherwise, not much else. Still, it is nice, and with the arrival of Sonic Superstars, Sonic Team seems to be more willing to acknowledge Sonic’s friends and the desire to make them playable. We are far from the days of Sonic the Hedgehog 4 openly boasting about just having Sonic being the only playable character.
Downsides: the expansion pack for Sonic’s gameplay is far too hard. So hard in fact that I gave up, just out of lack of interest. First, there are the 5 Trial Towers, and 3 of these have a lot of level design that requires precise platforming, something that you can often struggle with Sonic in Frontiers due to how slippery his movement is. Still, I persevered, beat the Trials, reach the top of the last Trial Towers, do the final trial. Find out said trial is a boss rush of the first 3 bosses of the game, with a very strict time limit, and the parry is no longer unlimited, it now has a strict timer. I’m done, I’m sure with a few hours practice I can do it, but my interest is just gone by this point. I wind up watching the final boss and cutscenes on Youtube. Final boss looks interesting at least, Sonic goes more Dragon Ball Z even more and I’m all for that kind of anime nonsense. Just wish Sonic Team didn’t constantly make these weird choices, stuff that feels like it has barely been playtested.
Frontiers did really well financially, it seems likely that the next mainline game will basically be Frontiers 2. I am very hopeful that Sonic Team can learn from their mistakes, polish up the gameplay formula, and make something genuinely great. I want to be able to fully recommend a Sonic game to people without having to put an asterix next to that recommendation. Hopefully the decision to make Tails, Knuckles, and Amy playable in this DLC would carry onto the next game, and hopefully, more of Ian Flynn’s writing.
Played Among Us’s new map, The Fungle. A lot of fun, I really like this map, not much else to say. Of the 5 maps in the game, I think I would rank it as my first or second favourite. Easily better than Mira HQ or the Airship.
@Freezer glad to hear you’re enjoying Sonic Superstars. I plan to pick it up myself but waiting for a bit of a price drop. I think $60 is just a bit too steep for a 2D Sonic game, which you can usually finish in 4 or 5 hours, and Sonic Mania was just $20.
I plan to pick up Persona 5 Tactica which comes out in a few weeks. Limited Run Games are doing physical versions of Persona 3 Portable and Persona 4 Golden, so thinking of just buying the basic versions of them for my Switch so I can have physical versions of them, I prefer to buy physical over digital for my console games and I love those games.
Need to find something in my backlog to play in the meantime. I got Stray as a birthday gift, think I may do that next.
