Kramer vs. Environment
an It Takes Two review
This article is part of a series called Reviews You Can’t Use, for reasons that will become immediately apparent.
My mother and father are divorced. They have been for a long time. They broke up when I was around two years old, so I don’t have any memory of it happening or the time that they were married. Growing up, I just always had a mom that I lived with most of the time and a dad that I lived with from Wednesday to Sunday every other week. And I feel very lucky to have had them. They didn’t spend any more time with each other than they had to, but they got along. They communicated. They put me first. I didn’t envy the kids whose parents were still together. That didn’t feel superior to me. They just had their thing, and I had mine. Once, during an assembly at my high school, the speaker asked everyone with divorced parents to raise their hands. I did, as did many others, and the speaker lamented how many of us there were. He said we had “broken homes”. I didn’t feel like I had a broken home — I felt like I had two homes that were both better than a lot of the other homes out there! I guess this is all to say that divorce is not an unusual or taboo concept to me. I’ve always been aware that it’s a thing people do.
Perhaps that explains why my mind went where it went as I watched the trailer for It Takes Two. While it opens on gameplay footage that depicts two handmade dolls adventuring through a world of everyday objects that look gigantic to them (because they’re dolls), it cuts fairly quickly to a cutscene of two adults having a tense conversation. The change in tone made an impression on me, and I mumbled something along the lines of “Who is this… divorced couple?” to myself. Then, as I kept watching, the camera zoomed out to show a young girl watching the adults from a window.
“Oh my God,” I gasped, “they are a divorced couple. That was supposed to be a joke.”
I turned on the sound and restarted the trailer. A man that I assume is a director or producer on the game narrates it, and he explains that the fighting couple and the dolls are the same characters, May and Cody. After their daughter, Rose, learns that they’re getting a divorce, she wishes on a mysterious book called The Book of Love that they would become friends again. Soon, May and Cody wake up to discover that they’ve become dolls and The Book of Love has come to life and started speaking to them. He tells them that he won’t return them to their human form until they fix their relationship, and while they don’t really like or believe him, they don’t have much of a choice but to face his challenges as they try to reach their daughter.
What follows from this one-of-a-kind premise is a one-of-a-kind game.
It Takes Two is the latest game from Hazelight, the studio best known for the beautiful and heart-wrenching co-op puzzle game Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. Their second game, A Way Out, is generally considered something of a sophomore slump for the studio, but for It Takes Two, Hazelight’s director, Josef Fares, has gone as far as to promise to pay $1000 to anyone that gets bored with it.
The game plays as a pretty traditional 3D platformer but with a heavy emphasis on collaborating to solve puzzles to unblock the way forward. Your player characters, as stated before, are dolls, and your environment is the world inside and around a house, exaggerated into a fantasy world by the magic of the book. To keep things fresh, you travel through several rooms/biomes over the course of the game, and in each one of them, May and Cody acquire a special ability specific to that environment. Among these are weapons, traversal tools, and even some light time traveling.
The game is not especially hard. May and Cody are cursed to respawn immediately whenever they die. Actually, I think that the game makes them die now and then in scripted sections just to take the sting out of the times it happens from mistakes. Most puzzles do not require you to be particularly dexterous or to have a fast reaction time, although a few do. There are combat sections in the game, including bosses, that could prove difficult for someone who is not good at video games in a traditional sense. Still, it’s fairly tenable for an experienced gamer to carry another player through the game, so long as the lagging player doesn’t mind dying all the time.
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That all adds up to gameplay that is fun but not life-changing. Instead, what wowed me was the presentation. The music is very good. The voice-acting is movie-quality (well, maybe except for The Book of Love’s) and plentiful. The graphics are excellent, and for the most part, the game is sumptuously animated. It feels a bit like (and I deploy this cliche with a touch of self-loathing, but I really do feel it’s accurate) playing a Pixar movie. (Though maybe it’s an earlier Pixar movie before they got good at animating real people.) I’m sure it helps that the plot is a bit Pixar-ish as well. Further enhancing the charm of the game is the way that it rewards you for exploring the (admittedly rather linear) world you’re in. Not only are the less important objects in the world well-modeled (often including readable text!), but many of them are reasonably interactive, as well. There’s glass you can break, toys you can play with, trains you can ride, and harpoons you can fire. Now, because there isn’t an in-game inventory or power-ups, the game can’t really give you anything for playing with these little details outside of some dialogue and occasionally an achievement (the only Origin achievements I expect to ever claim), and I’ll admit that sometimes that made these environmental tchotchkes feel pointless. But in general, it feels very good to mess with stuff! It all adds up to an experience that actually does feel a bit magical from time to time.
Finally, there’s just one thing I need to get off my chest: both this game and Brothers make a strangely dramatic affair of… ripping limbs off of things. Maybe it just sticks in my mind because it’s the one sort of direct violence that you do to something in Brothers (Don’t worry, you do all kinds of other violence in this game!), but I just feel like it’s not something I’m made to do very much in video games, except when Hazelight makes them! Is this a kink? Actually, don’t answer that. Just be prepared for it, I suppose. One of these days, I might play A Way Out as well, and if I do, I’ll be prepared for an appearance by J. Walter Weatherman.
Spoiler Warning: the game’s ending is discussed beyond this point.
The ending is as good as I can imagine it being under this game’s constraints. The Book of Love’s plan works. As Cody and May are forced to rely on each other to journey forward, they rebuild their trust. As each of them is forced to use their unique strengths and talents, the other remembers why they admired them. And as they encounter reminders of the promises each of them has made and broken, their anger at each other is tempered by shame. They remember the fun times they had together and the sacrifices that each of them made for their family. May and Cody eventually share a loving embrace, and they wake up in their real bodies to discover that Rose blames herself for the divorce and has run away. They find her quickly and reassure her that she is in no way responsible for their fighting. She asks if this means they’re staying together, and they answer that no matter what happens, they will always love her and be there for her.
And that’s the way it had to be, right? This whimsical game with talking squirrels and dolls come to life and a magic book who won’t stop gyrating his hips has to have a happy ending. For them to end the game angry at each other would be, frankly, traumatic, and even an amicable separation would still end the game on Rose crying, unless we are to believe that she fully processed her grief and came to peace with the things that would never be over the course of less than a day. Like a Mario game, you know the broad strokes of how this game will end from the moment you start it.
To the plot’s credit, they never say “we’re staying together” outright. I think it would have cheapened the moment. Even after the whopper of a therapy session that May and Cody go through, there’s still going to be work to do and discussions to have before any decisions are reversed. Still, you know that it’s going to happen. Art demands resolution in a way that real life does not.
In August 2008, my mother and my father took a trip together for the first time in almost 20 years. It was to see me off to college. This was the first time since I was in diapers that I had seen them more or less alone together for an extended period of time. I was acutely aware of this, and I was watching closely. “This is what it was like,” I thought to myself, watching them discuss even the smallest decisions. While I’ve never longed for them to get back together, I’ve always been a bit curious what it would be like if they did, and this felt like a sneak peek into that scenario. In that short trip, I learned a lot. I felt like I started to see why things worked between them all those years ago. But at the same time, I felt more aware than ever of why things didn’t.
Some would say that if a divorce happens in your life, you necessarily made a bad choice. Others would disagree. But outside of religious objections, I think just about everyone in Western society would agree that there are circumstances where divorce is the best choice. Of course, it’s only in the direst of circumstances (abuse, for instance) that we can know for sure. The vast majority of times, we have to make our choice as an educated guess, never knowing for sure what lay down the path not taken. Ending a relationship is like starting a relationship that way. My parents and I will never get to know where in the vast realm of possibility we’re happiest. But that’s okay. I don’t think any family gets to know that with certainty. (Though some believe they do, thanks to their faith or an especially fatalistic conception of love.) All I can know is that in this world, I’m happy.
Overlooking this uncertainty is, I think, the most regular way that Western media fails the divorced. Instead, we’re often told that with enough work, any marriage can and should be saved. It’s a comforting thing to believe, and it’s natural to want to celebrate the couples that put the work in and manage it. But when we make that assumption, it follows that the divorced are a loss— that they were too weak, too lazy, too selfish, or just plain unlucky.
Video games still have some growing to do in this space, not least because sometimes they just can’t make space for more detailed storytelling. Like I said before, I don’t think that this game should have ended differently. Nonetheless, It Takes Two cannot escape its raw mechanics: press the right buttons and you will save this marriage. Knowing that made me hear echoes of that pernicious assumption I just described. Still, I enjoyed this game, and I recommend it gladly. Not everyone will enjoy a co-op platformer, but if you do, this is a masterclass in how to make one. It made me believe in May and Cody by the end, and learning about their relationship was a journey worth taking. I might play through it again someday, perhaps with someone I’m keen to apply its lessons with. You know… preventatively.
Final Score: 10/10, but you’re forced to tear off one of the points over the course of the game
