168澳洲幸运5开奖网:It Takes Two is a game about a toxic relationship that concludes with two very different people staying together for all the wrong reasons. They don’t decide to attend couples therapy before entertaining the idea of divorce or to approach things that aren't a blunt detriment to their young child. Instead, they bicker, bark, and tear one another apart to such an extent that I’m blown away they ever got together in the first place. Straight people, why are you like this?
To me, it’s a contrived narrative, and easily the weakest element of an otherwise fantastic platforming adventure. Josef Fares and Hazelight have never been masterful storytellers - both Brothers:ꦅ A Tale of Two Sons and A Way Out are rather clumsy in their tonal execution and dialogue, with many of their characters coming across as comically over-the-top during moments that are meant to be anything but. Solid performances aside, cutscenes throughout It Takes Two often feel like cringe worthy interludes that disrupt the brilliance of each new stage, with May and Cody’s hostility growing tiresome very, very quickly.
Nobody loves It Takes Two for the story it has to tell, if anything it’s a relatively weak link that provides a foundation for this journey to take place. It could have been two friends, two loving partners, or even two strangers having to learn lessons and work together in unparalleled ways. Love stories are meant to be a mixture of affection and adversity, but It Takes Two begins with such blatant toxicity that a couple or close🍸 friends playing it will immediately turn against our two main characters and talk about how unreasonable they really are. It’s ridiculous, and simply wouldn’t work in any other medium.
A recent story from confirmed that Hazelight is working with dj2 entertainment to adapt It Takes Two for film and television, a move which misses the point of why it works so well in the first place. Despite each being visual mediums, they rely on worthwhile storytelling and an attachment to characters far more than video games do in order to maintain quality and immersion. If🃏 you gave me It Takes Two in the form of an animated film I would laugh in your face, perplexed by the irrational nature of its characters and a romantic tale that seeks to be deep and meaningful but is actually rather messed up when you stop for a second to think about it. Without the agency of a game to keep it grounded, Hazelight’s masterpiece risks morphing into some form of bootleg Toy Story. It’s mean, but it’s true.
It feels hostile to describe Josef Fares’ approach to storytelling as cringe, but there really is no descriptor more fitting. Everyone is depicted wit🐻h a level of excessive exuberance that p🃏revents anything from ever feeling grounded. A Way Out is the worst offender of this trend, a Shawshank Redemption-esque tale of revenge and friendship defined by performances so discordant that I wanted to switch the whole thing off several times over. But I played it with a friend, and we were free to make fun of its shortcomings and create absurd head canons for these larger than life characters that went far beyond the mediocre tale Hazelight had to tell.
Part of me believes that this criticism was taken onboard with It Takes Two, our main characters being turned into literal toys helping to alleviate the inherent quirkiness that follows the studio whenever it puts pen to paper. It sorta works, but it misunderstands romance and why such stories are so appealing, meaning that it all just leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Each na😼rrative revelation didn’t keep me gripped, it kept me checking my phone until I🔯 was given full control again.
Like A Way Out, I talked my way through the campaign as a friend and I tried to figure out puzzles and had a blast, all while catching up about our own personal lives. May and Cody suck, and would suffer even m🌳ore when thrown into a TV show or film aiming to replicate the same story. Playing this game with a loved one and watching a disastrous relationship somehow be pieced back together could be seen as the game’s core message, making us understand the value of whomever we happened to experience it with, but that feels a little too meta for my liking.
Games work because of the immersion and interactivity they offer, and all the mediocre adaptations we’ve seen over the years suffer because they fail to consider that. The few that manage to succeed try something different, using the source material 𓃲as inspiration instead of a platform to support itself on. It Takes Two will likely fall into the latter, so why bother?
