It Does Not Take Three
It Takes Two is validating my stance on not having children
My spouse and I finished our playthrough of It Takes Two over a couple of weeks’ worth of couples gaming time. Sadly, as with many games my spouse likes, it’s an excellent spiritual sequel to a game with a similar concept that was done less well the first time, with little hope of another game on the horizon. We’re talking Chants of Senaar. We're talking Inside. We’re (sort of) talking about Little Kitty Big City. Games that my partner falls in love with, finishes, get sad about finishing, and all I have to offer in consolation sounds to them like “I’m sorry you’re grieving, here’s an older stinkier game you probably won’t like as much!”.
I’ve tried and failed to get them into a long-running series of lengthy video games. They’re just committed to small bursts of quality innovation. The nerve! There are not enough Luigi’s Mansion sequels. Anyway, I had some specific points about It Takes Two and got completely sidetracked talking about my partner’s exquisite and narrow taste in niche games.
It Takes Two is a surprisingly meaty co-op adventure game about the failing marriage of May and Cody Goodwin. They are turned into toy doll versions of themselves through the magical sad tears of their daughter, who was just told that mum and dad are breaking up. Instead of wishing on a star like a normal child, this haunted girl whose name I cannot remember has wished on a talking, hip-thrusting relationship self-help book called (and by) Dr. Hakim. One has to wonder whether the talking book summons the soul of the real-life Dr. Hakim or merely a copy of his spiritual essence but that’s a discussion for another time.
To break the curse that their daughter has put on them (and this is a curse) mini May and mini Cody have to work together to clear obstacles, solve puzzles, and traverse tricky platforming courses to get back to their real bodies before their daughter suffers from too much child neglect. They also quickly discover (in the text) that their bodies are immortal and regenerate when they die, which they acknowledge and move on from with relative ease. I aspire to be the kind of person who would acclimatise to being trapped in a clay/wooden homunculus with the grace of May and Cody. Rock solid spiritual fortitude there. I would simply perish from psychic damage.
After spending 10-15 hours hanging out with May and Cody it’s hard to see them not fundamentally getting along as people. Much of what hasn’t been working about their relationship comes across as implied backstory and not as the text of their moment-to-moment interactions. The opening cutscene shows their human selves having a spat borne from the grind of their everyday lives. May commutes, Cody takes on a lot of the childcare responsibilities. While both aren’t pursuing their passions, we learn this is mostly remedied with two minutes on the therapy couch and some mild peril. These characters are acted and written as a perfectly nice couple who have allowed themselves to forget why they got married.
Post-cursing it’s hard to see why these two are getting divorced! Even if you don’t cane the gameplay like my partner and I, the characters very quickly rise to the occasion, team up, and support each other when it comes down to it with little much bad to say about each other than ‘You never did get around to doing that task’. What next? Does one of them chew too loud? Snore? Fuck off. Where’s the real divorce fuel?
It has to be the kid right? Not directly. She seems nice enough in a haunted kind of way and it’s not like she asked for any of this drama with her parents. Using his magic relationship counselling sorcery, Dr. Hakim takes May and Cody to the skiing village where Cody first proposed and it’s easy to see the two of them as compatible, romantic, passionate people. There are multiple references to increased household outgoings due to childcare, resulting in a sidelining of personal projects, and further skiing trips, and there’s a whole section of gameplay that reveals that they’ve stopped taking care of each other in the bedroom. That last part isn’t true, but we know it’s probably a factor. Even their opening cutscene spat stems from a screw-up around an important appointment for… what’s her name again?
Look I tried! She’s not even on this list of named characters. A vacuum called ‘Vacuum’ gets a higher billing! There’s nothing fundamentally dysfunctional about the parent-child relationships either. These parents adore their weird kid and do all they can as parents to support put a roof over her head and make her childhood special. They also let their relationship veer into the jagged rocks during these years.
Maybe it’s because I was sad that the game was over, but the main emotional beat that I took away from It Takes Two is that I’d rather be turned into a small immortal goblin to go on little adventures with my spouse than regain my humanity and go back to a life of parents’ evenings and holidays where I can’t properly relax. I’m happy with our double income no kids (dink!) lifestyle but there are no casual answers to the question “Should we have kids?” but if It Takes Two has anything to say about it, the answer isn’t a resounding yes.