On… It Takes Two
Pressing your buttons, yet again.
“The family that plays together, stays together.”
Waddingtons.
As artists – and yes, a novel about Millwall is art – we’re always striving to deliver moments of beauty… moments that inspire the intense feelings that make life worth living.
If we’re lucky, we might manage it. We might nail a scene or a denouement… a death, a wedding, a kiss, a comment, a revelation, a chord progression, or even a beautiful literary motif about a mazy dribble in a tricky away fixture that will, not that the publishing industry will ever let you see it, send you into a flood of tears.
Fleeting moments of brilliance. Art that stimulates emotions. Love in a communicable form.
We see them in fiction. On stages. On canvas. In cinemas. And we hear them on the stereo too.
But I don’t think I’d ever experienced one of these beautiful moments in a computer game, until I played It Takes Two.
Now, I don’t know how much you play computer games, but if you’re a man of my age you probably had access to a Sega Game Gear or Nintendo Game Boy, or if you were rich, an Atari Lynx. Maybe you got on a SNES and played Star Fox or ISS Pro Evolution, had a mate with a Sega Mega Drive for Altered Beast, Streets of Rage, Fifa 95 and Ecco the Dolphin for his sister, and later he had a PlayStation with Metal Gear Solid or an N64 with GoldenEye 007 which let’s face it, if we still had it now, would destroy our productivity and anger our wives.
If you had a PC you played Championship Manager for hours and days and weeks, which will have impacted your success in education, with women, and in social situations in later life… and all so you could buy (or keep) Cherno Samba in an achingly-slow fictional promotion push with a lower league team.
And by the way, I love you for it.
Maybe later you got an Xbox and into Call of Duty or had kids and got sucked into Fortnite and Roblox but all that passed me by, so much so, I don’t think I’d played on a console for the best part of a decade until – thinking gaming is important culturally, and may be an outlet for supreme narrative talent – we got a PlayStation 5.
… and we got It Takes Two.
If you’ve not heard of it, It Takes Two is a split/screen co-op game, meaning you can play it on the couch with your partner, but it could be a friend or a relative. It follows a traditionally male-female married couple, Cody and May, who are on the verge of a divorce, until their daughter, desperate for a reconciliation, accidentally transforms them into tiny wooden dolls.
And so Cody and May must stop arguing and begin an adventure to restore themselves to human form… via platform-based gameplay in lovingly-realised environments such as a shed, treehouse, cuckoo clock, snow-globe and household attic.
From the first moment, we were hooked. This is a classic 3D jumping platform game, but you can dash, swim, fly, skid, throw, sing, stomp, aim and fire along the way. The difficulty is just right, both for experienced and novice players. But you must co-operate. Which means you must talk to one another and work together towards a shared goal… which should make you feel closer to one another in real-life too.
One of the many beautiful things about It Takes Two is it takes traditional domestic settings and converts them into bewitching locations full of wonder. We had a fight against a vacuum cleaner. We rode frogs and snails. We threw snowballs and paper aeroplanes. We watered plants, and climbed trees and played giant chess and threw icicles and snuck past sleeping moles, and we swang from ropes and boinged from bongo drums, and I’m pretty sure we fired some human cannonballs too.
And every so often you get a delicious change of pace, where you might ice skate together, or play an old-fashioned theme park stall game together…
… and it’s just like being on a magical date…
… before you enter the last level, a musician-themed scenario which involves psychedelic guitar slides, the slinging of symbols, and constant taunting from a randy, floating book of love.
… and yes, you have to make sweet music together... before the climax…
… which I won’t reveal…
… but who knew holding the triangle button down at the same time could nearly bring you to tears?
It Takes Two is brilliant. It is the antidote to your ills. It is the answer to your questions and the remedy to your cynicism.
It may almost, almost, restore your faith in humanity.
Make up with your wife. Apologise for that thing you did at Christmas. Persuade your husband to stop agonising and being so distracted and irritable over Cole Palmer’s World Cup squad omission and make him join you on the PS5. If you’re single, get yourself a boyfriend, girlfriend or whatever a ‘they’-friend is called. Call your best pal, or a mate you’ve not spoken to in years, get them round, get a takeaway, get them on the couch, stick a DualShock controller in their hand and put It Takes Two on the screen.
Because true beauty – and an even-closer relationship - awaits.
++ What’s the best thing you did with your partner? Try to keep it clean…
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If you liked that one…
Read: On… retirement
Read: On… You Are Here
Read: On… rejection
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Oh Sven…
I read Sven Göran-Eriksson’s book A Beautiful Game: Reflections on Life and Football last week. It didn’t quite deliver for me; not enough behind the scenes anecdotes, not enough on his footballing tactics, and not enough philosophy on dying or insight into his mindset and what drove him.
But it did deliver Sven’s assessment of Boris Johnson:
“I took one look at him and immediately reacted to his hairdo. He knew absolutely nothing about football, Boris. Zip! I believe it was the first football match he ever saw. What kind of idiot is this, I wondered. He behaved like a fool, as though all was not quite right upstairs.”
Forget football. Forget everything. England won’t heal itself until the population realises – like Sven – that the cream doesn’t rise to the top.
Instead, the scum floats upon the surface.
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