It’s a very exciting time here at Hazelight. We’re about to bring our baby into the world. Next week, on March 26, the wild, funny, and magical co-op action adventure platformer It Takes Two will blow your minds away. I’m not kidding! You’ve never seen anything like it.
Catch up on the latest trailer, then keep scrolling for new gameplay info.
Don’t take my word for it though. Just download the Friend’s Pass version of It Takes Two from the PlayStation Store on PS4 or PS5 on March 26. It’s free. Give it a go in local couch co-op – or have a friend download the Friend’s Pass as well to play online – and you can try out the entire first level. If you enjoy it, only one of you needs to buy the full game to keep playing together.
One aspect of It Takes Two that I’m really passionate about is the way we’re marrying story and gameplay in innovative ways. I’ve talked a lot about this since we revealed the game. But today, I wanted to dive into the backstories of our two main characters, Cody and May, to give you some more examples of how this comes to life.
May wields a sickle against enemies while Cody rams as a tomato.
In the beginning of the story, we learn that Cody and May are about to split up. Their daughter, Rose, is devastated. She desperately wants them to stay together. Feeling she can’t share her worries with her parents, she turns to a book titled “Book of Love” and two dolls that she’s created to represent her parents. When she wishes for them to become friends again, Rose unknowingly and magically transforms them into the dolls, teleporting mom and dad into a magical world.
Here, they encounter Dr. Hakim, a living version of Rose’s “Book of Love”. He’s a crazy and passionate guy (kinda like me – I actually did the mocap for Dr. Hakim myself!) and claims that he’s promised Rose to fix their broken marriage.
Cody steers the growth of a flower as May leaps across the leaves.
Before ending up as a doll made out of clay, Cody spent his time as a caring stay-at-home dad. Ever since his nursery garden business went bankrupt, his sense of being a failure grew and the once-strong passion for gardening faded away. May, on the other hand, is a really sharp engineer, working overtime to keep the family economy afloat. She’s also abandoned her passion for music and singing, as a result of not having enough time.
This strange world that they now find themselves in is a representation of all of this – of Cody and May’s neglect of their passions, each other, and their surroundings, ultimately leading to a broken marriage.
This is something that the two players must tackle throughout the game. At one point they arrive at Cody’s garden. It’s overgrown and overtaken by weeds, insects, animals, and other weird things that have turned against them.
Here, Dr. Hakim – always creating challenges and providing new powers and gadgets for them throughout the adventure – grants Cody the ability to “become one” with his gardening again. Quite literally. Cody is now able to shoot a sprout out of his own head to attack enemies or grab onto items in the environment. Or plant himself in certain dirt patches to become a needle-shooting cactus. Or a growing vine with leaves acting as platforms for May to jump on. Or a big tomato that can roll around and smash into enemies!
But May needs to support her partner in his passion, and she receives a water hose to help Cody in making the garden blossom again and a scythe to hack-and-slash through the weeds and enemies.
Similarly, they must deal with their own difficulties of handling time. As they’re traversing Rose’s room, May gets irritated when she realizes that Cody has used her chess board to build a toy castle. Cody notes that she never uses it anyways, which May then again blames on the lack of time. Just as when she abandoned her passion for singing.
In a later level, taking place inside the family’s cuckoo clock, the couple is challenged by Dr. Hakim to finally take care of this issue. May can now clone herself to be in two places at the same time. Another feature of May’s cloning ability is that she can switch places with her clone at will, sometimes being able to pass through objects like maybe a crushing wall. And Cody can control objects in the world and make them travel either backwards or forward in time. Not only does this ability work on static objects but also sometimes on stuff like explosions.
Regardless of the challenges (and there’s gonna be A LOT of them) that Cody and May are put up against, the key is always for them – and the players – to work together.