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.

It takes two imdb