The elephant sequence in It Takes Two (2021)

[Mister Six]

yo what the fuck

[Mister Six]

Also, I suppose everyone can discuss games with really bizarrely misguided, tone-deaf sequences that put you off ever touching the game again.

[Kelvin]

yo what the fuck

I watched several streamers play through that game, and all of them commented on the weird tonal shifts throughout. One moment it's a goofy Honey, I Shrunk the Kids ripoff, riding around on bees, next you're willingly torturing an elephant, or agonising over a broken marriage while your daughter cries.

Story aside, though, I was absolutely amazed at the variety of gameplay and mechanics throughout the game. Really impressive stuff, at least to someone who was watching rather than playing it.

[Mobius]

Yeah... my partner had a lot of fun playing this, but found the 2 main characters and the book of love very annoying. Bit of a weird choice of a storyline for a colourful coop game that I assume would appeal to kids, all this divorce stuff and boring adult conversations.

The elephant bit was just jarring and unneccessary. Not sure if it was meant to be funny, or weirdly dark, but it just didn't really "work"

[Kelvin]

Just rewatched the clip of Dunkey and his wife streaming it, and at one point he says:  "This is like in Breaking Bad, when they've gotta kill the guy in the basement... Except it's a cute elephant."

[Mister Six]

I watched several streamers play through that game, and all of them commented on the weird tonal shifts throughout. One moment it's a goofy Honey, I Shrunk the Kids ripoff, riding around on bees, next you're willingly torturing an elephant, or agonising over a broken marriage while your daughter cries.

Story aside, though, I was absolutely amazed at the variety of gameplay and mechanics throughout the game. Really impressive stuff, at least to someone who was watching rather than playing it.

Yeah, it's an amazing game that's absolutely packed full of ideas and humour, and the protagonists are very obviously supposed to be selfish arseholes. There's a vein of dark humour throughout.

But this elephant scene... it's so wantonly cruel and unpleasant, in a game that's until now been quite careful about how far it'll push things. A deeply unpleasant experience.

[Beagle 2]

Christ! I had been playing this with the kids but hadn't got to that bit yet, I don't think I'll bother now. Great game but definitely a weird vibe to the whole thing.

Also when I clicked on the comments I realised I've went to the birthday party of the woman who voices the elephant, about ten years ago. Bit weird seeing her pop up again - never spoke to her since.

[Mister Six]

If you can stomach it, find an accomplice to do that bit with you when the kids aren't around. I don't think anything after that is as upsetting.

You're basically safe until you get to the big cardboard castle level, but once you're past the overhead shooter section (which is great, and could have been longer) you're in the danger zone.

[The Guppy]

I played through this with my niece (13). I was aghast at what we did to Cutie, but my niece was unfazed. She's a stone-cold psycho though.

Neither of us liked the bickering cunts or the Book of fucking Love. The game is otherwise excellent.

[Cerys]

So what we're saying is that they spend at least part of the game dealing with the elephant in the room?

[Kelvin]

So what we're saying is that they spend at least part of the game dealing with the elephant in the room?

[beanheadmcginty]

For all the people like me who won't ever play this game, what is happens to the elephant? Trunk stuck up its own arse?

[idunnosomename]

sought this out but wasnt really arsed by it tbh. more intrigued what you actually do in the game since here it's all like, press x to pull its arm off etc

also she's fine at the end. as if falling off a cupboard is going to kill a toy.

[Mister Six]

It's almost like playing a game for several hours and getting invested in its fictional world as you actively engage in what's happening is a different emotional experience to watching a four-minute contextless segment on YouTube, or something.

[Kelvin]

Mister Six (and presumably his wife) seem to have had a particularly strong reaction to the section, but it's definitely a very jarring tonal shift, from a largely wholesome story about two puppets riding animals and escaping moles, to torturing a gentle, desperate toy elephant in order to deliberately make their daughter cry. At one point the elephant's ear gets pieced by a knife and the player has to pull the ear off while it begs them to stop.

It's just a very protracted, weirdly mean-spirited section that would feel more at home in a darkly comic game like, say, Conker's Bad Fur Day, than the much gentler world of this game.     

[Mister Six]

The game does have an offbeat, slightly cynical sense of humour throughout (there's a bit where, after killing loads of wasps in self-defence, you discover they were being led by a bee in disguise, but because the bee is cute and the wasps are ugly, the shallow, horrible protagonists forgive her and let her fly off) but this whole section is just so protracted and unpleasant.

Obviously they're going for grim humour with the juxtaposition of the fluffy little world and this incredibly dark moment, but the game has spent the preceding - I dunno, 10 hours or so? - getting you to invest in this world and treat it all relatively seriously, so it's hard (or at least it was hard for me) to view it with the level of ironic detachment with which the creators apparently intended the players to take it.

[madhair60]

man dont be such a pussy. come on now.

[Memorex MP3]

Kinda settled on thinking this game was terrible. It largely redone a lot of the same things A Way Out done amazingly, and it done a lot of them much better, but it felt like 3 times as long but without the novelty of being the first time the things were done or the humour of that game*
Felt like they misunderstood what made that game so fun.

Two tough guys doing loads of silly shit in the midst of a compilation of movie action scenes is a lot more ripe for humour than this toxic relationship and impending divorce that we're for some reason seemingly trying to prevent; even without accounting for the bizarre tonal shifts.

My guess for why the two characters were so awful is that they talked themselves into a corner in the writers room. They wanted the woman to be the breadwinner to reverse tropes (good) but accidentally wrote a dynamic where she was a cold nightmare (bad); so to correct that they turned him into a selfish man child and now the child has two awful parents instead (very bad)



The elephant scene was just confirmation that the game was absolutely not going to in some way shift the narrative away from the very deranged direction it seemed to be going down. That it was almost immediately followed by the endgame "to finish you now need to do these 4 challenges" padfest was enough to make the last few hours a colossal slog.

[madhair60]

i thought it was really good fun with my bff