It Takes Two Review: The Best Argument for Playing Games Together

The real triumph is how ferociously the game keeps reinventing itself. One chapter puts a rewinding clock in one player's hands while the other has to act inside the loop; the next arms each of you with a single asymmetric tool, a nail gun paired with a hammer, sap paired with a box of matches, that is useless alone and potent in tandem. Then it discards both without ceremony and briefly becomes a twin-stick shooter, or a rhythm-game interlude, or a straight third-person platformer. One chapter drops you into a squabbling war against wasps in an overgrown garden; another swells into a full space opera complete with tractor beams; a music-themed level literally scores itself to your platforming. The through-line is never a single mechanic but a mood, two tiny figures improvising their way through a world built at ten times their scale.

It sustains this trick across the full ten-to-twelve hours without visibly running out of gas, which is genuinely remarkable. Most studios would stretch any one of these mechanics into an entire game and a sequel; Hazelight introduces an idea, wrings the fun out of it, and throws it away before it can wear thin. The sheer quantity of discarded concepts here would keep a lesser developer in business for a decade. Most acts also build to a proper boss, a set-piece that forces the two of you to read the arena and split roles on the fly, one baiting an attack while the other lands the hit, and the best of them are as satisfying to crack as anything in a dedicated action game.

Just as important, the whole thing is tuned so that two people of wildly different skill levels can sit side by side and both have a good time. That makes it one of the very few games you can genuinely share with a partner, a sibling, or a child without either player drifting into boredom, because the design is constantly handing each of you something distinct and necessary to do. It is a co-op game that actively wants the more experienced player to slow down and teach. There is no lives system and no real way to fail for long, which ought to bleed away the tension but instead frees both players to experiment, flail, and laugh off a botched jump without a loading screen for punishment. It makes the whole thing unusually welcoming to people who do not otherwise touch games at all.

Scattered across every chapter are optional competitive minigames, chess, tug-of-war, whack-a-mole, a dozen others, that exist for no reason beyond letting the two of you needle each other for a minute and laugh about it. They are pure texture, the kind of small generosity a purely functional design would have quietly cut. Hunting them down becomes its own little side quest. Hazelight even keeps a running tally of who won each one, so a placid puzzle-platformer quietly accumulates a private, petty rivalry underneath it, and half the fondest memories people carry out of the game are of a whack-a-mole grudge rather than any scripted beat.

Where it plainly stumbles is the script. The story holding all this invention together is broad, loud, and frequently saccharine, the dialogue lurches into outright cringe more than once, and one much-discussed scene involving a tearful sacrificed toy misjudges its tone so badly it has become a punchline. The plot is the toll you pay for the gameplay rather than a reason to turn up, and the puzzles, for all their cleverness, are far more inventive than they are actually difficult. A capable pair will rarely be stuck for more than a minute, and what challenge exists comes almost entirely from coordination rather than raw execution, which is either exactly the point or a mild letdown depending on what you came looking for.

It Takes Two plunders a child's toy box for its aesthetic, and that magpie restlessness is precisely the point. Every chapter constructs an entire miniature realm at doll scale, opening with a garden shed remade as a jungle, then a snow globe, then a clockwork kingdom of gears and felt and ticking cuckoos, each one coated in the oversaturated, touchable gloss of a big animated film. Everyday objects loom enormous and inviting when you are two inches tall, and the camera clearly delights in framing a good split-screen diorama.

The music refuses to hold still either, sliding from sweeping orchestral adventure to sudden flamenco guitar to a full, gloriously absurd show tune without a hint of embarrassment. The sound design leans all the way into the childlike tactility of the world, the cartoon boing of a springboard, the wet squelch of sap, toy percussion rattling under set-pieces cobbled together from garden implements and clock parts. It is consistently louder and sillier than it has any real need to be.

That excess is not a flaw but the entire personality. A more restrained, tasteful version of this game would be a distinctly worse one, because the relentless, slightly unhinged generosity of the presentation is precisely what keeps two players leaning into the screen and grinning at each other. It is a game that never stops trying to delight you, and it mostly, exhaustingly, succeeds.