Partner and I just finished playing It Takes Two: It is an absolutely amazing, beautiful and varied co-op game with a small handful of incredibly weird writing choices that leave me wondering what the hell the devs were thinking

Ok so this post is both a recommendation and a discussion: I want to start with the good parts, because there is genuinely SO much to love and appreciate about this game and I think it deserves to be played. And then I'm interested in people's opinions on some WTF moments along the way and the nuances of the dialogue. All in all I really think the game is great, it gets so many things right gameplay wise, is super pretty and polished, and then there's a small handful of choices (and one WTF scene in particular) that I just do not get, but which don't change the fact that I recommend playing it. Spoilers are tagged, so this should be save to read. What it's about (from the game's website): Play as the clashing couple Cody and May, two humans turned into dolls by a magic spell. Trapped in a fantastical world, they’re reluctantly challenged with saving their fractured relationship by the suave love guru Dr. Hakim. The Good * Like Hazelights' previous game A Way Out, It Takes Two is 100% a co-op game, made entirely to accommodate two players, with lots of asymmetric mechanics, helping each other, making paths for each other, timing actions right etc. I played it with my partner and can only recommend that, it's been a ton of fun. (only one person needs to buy the 40$ game, even for playing on two PCs) * The scope of this really surprised me: While Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons was 2h long and A Way Out (which I haven't played, we started at some point and want to get back to it now) has about 6-8h of gameplay, It Takes Two kept us busy for a good 12 hours. And in that time, there is SO much variety. You have the basic platforming mechanics that stay the same along the way, but there are 7 areas completely different in style and mood, and honestly countless puzzles, with both players getting a different item/mechanic in each of the 7 chapters (and losing it again at the end of the section) * It's absolutely beautiful. I don't play many AAA games these days because they just rarely do anything to really capture my interest, but this one just has so many lovely details and pretty environments and cute animations and little references and neat places.... It's very dense and filled with love imo. * It's just rare to get such a pretty, polished and well working 3D platformer and puzzler game. I don't think anything recent can even compare? * I started out finding the Dr Hakim character slightly annoying and ended up loving him and his entire shtick, especially as I got more annoyed with May and Cody. They deserve everything that book is doing to them and more. --- The Bad * We were a tad annoyed at first that you always play in split screen, even when on two PCs, and therefore only really use half of the screen. It's a stylistic choice I suppose, and one that saves some time/effort because it's always the same framing regardless of platform/player situation. * I had quite some framerate drops (like, down to
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