The gaming industry is one of the fastest-changing and fastest evolving in the world, styles, and interests change year after year, and to keep up with a rapidly growing audience – it does mean that over time certain features get lost, and even the fan favourites that many hopes for a comeback often don’t. A recent focus has certainly been on mobile gaming too, some of the favourite genres like those found at CNOG have become increasingly popular despite changes in regulation like gamstop to slow them, which means many big titles tend to a similar style too, but a recent release has brought an exciting little co-op adventure back and has shown what many have been missing.
Released by Hazelight Studios, It Takes Two is a two-player co-op puzzle-solving game that brings back something many players may not have seen for a long time – split screen. You can play locally, or online, but both deliver the same split-screen approach as it takes working in tandem with your partner to get through all of the challenges, and by showing what each player is doing at the same time it makes some of the challenges much easier to navigate. The story is centered around two parents going through marital problems, and in order to save the marriage, their daughter casts a spell to turn them into dolls. The game takes these two dolls through a variety of beautiful stages to solve challenges, beat bosses, and ultimately get back to their real bodies.
(Image from guidefall.com)
Whilst the game isn’t all that long, clocking in at maybe ten to fifteen hours depending on how quickly you push through, and also not entirely that challenging as some of the challenges are very simple, but doesn’t take away from the fun of the experience. There’s a lot of charm to the game, in every aspect of each level as every unique approach takes the player on a new journey, with very distinct and different challenges from the previous.
The game is clearly a huge passion project by the developers and that is shown in the way the co-op system works, only one player has to buy the game and will have access to a friend pass to give to another friend to play together, and with local play options to it does mean that no online play is required to complete it, just a willing partner. It brings back a lot of excitement from games of the past, something that has certainly been lost over the years with the newer approaches to gaming, and shows that there is still a huge demand from a much wider audience to bring back some of these features that give the nostalgia, but also give the feeling of a co-op experience that doesn’t fizzle into a solo experience over some time as many modern games have started to do.
