If you’ve been playing the Outriders demo ahead of the shooter’s launch you might have noticed its reliance on using cutscenes to transition between areas. According to its developer, People Can Fly, these are required for the game’s multiplayer to function seamlessly.
Eurogamer reached out to People Can Fly after noticing that the demo featured numerous instances of cutscenes for small transitions that would otherwise be an in-game animation. People Can Fly’s creative director Bartek Kmita explained that the decision was made to use cutscenes so that other players in your party have context for what transition is taking place.
“It started quite pragmatic, because we needed a system that would help us teleport the players and stream some other content to start to load the other arena,” Kmita explained. “A good example is opening the door. That was only because people in playtests said, ‘Oh, where am I? Why was I teleported?’ So, we needed to have these cutscenes. We couldn’t have done it so manually you can go through the doors, because we have a multiplayer game that opens different problems for us.”
Outriders doesn’t use dedicated servers to power its co-operative gameplay, so People Can Fly can’t rely on that architecture to support players transitioning and exploring different areas of the map at the same time. This means it requires these transitions to group everyone back up again, with Kmita explaining that it’s unlikely to change.
“I would like to have the door opening animation for two seconds, but still playing together with my friends, than just breaking apart through transmission,” Kmita continued. “So we chose this solution. We understand it’s not the best.”
The system is especially jarring when playing solo, which People Can Fly has advertised heavily as a viable option for Outriders. These transitions don’t disappear despite a lot of their purpose not being required, which makes the game feel old when compared to how many modern titles handle these asset loads.
Outriders launches on Xbox One, PS4, and PC on April 1.
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The newest update for Red Dead Redemption 2‘s multiplayer mode has landed, bringing with it a variety of opportunities to earn extra XP and save big on a variety of items. Rockstar ran down all the details in a blog post and we’re rounding up the key details here.
Featured Series
This week’s Featured Series event is the Most Wanted multiplayer mode with a “hardcore” twist. Most Wanted simple kill or be killed mode, but the twist is that the more kills you get, the bigger the target on your back. The idea, then, becomes to target the high-value players to earn the most points. No matter how you finish, everyone gets double RDO$ and XP in Most Wanted through March 8.
Special Bonuses And Extras
Also new in Red Dead Online this week are special bonuses for players who discover any collectible in Free Roam mode, except for the condor egg. You’ll get double the normal XP for finding these, while the Collector Free Roam events are paying an extra 50% RDO$.
Those who find and turn in the Tully Monster fossil, the Cephalopod fossil, and the rock bass to Madam Nazar to complete the Deep Blue Collection will get 30% off a Novice- or Promising-level Collector role item of your choosing.
Additionally, all fences in Red Dead Online are forgoing their usual rank requirements for weapons such as throwing knives, cleavers, dynamite, fire bottles, hatchers, machetes, and tomahawks. Additionally, there are no rank requirements for pamphlets up to rank 50 for the week. On top of that, all fast travel is free this week. “Go ahead, move like the wind,” Rockstar said.
New Items And Discounts
This week, the Wheeler, Rawson & Co. Catalogue is offering a number of clothing and accessories that are new to Red Dead Online. These include the following:
Boutell Hat
Furred Gloves
Macbay Jacket
Winter Shotgun Coat
Morales Vest
Shaffer Chaps
Darned Stockings
Calhoun Boots
Cossack Hat
The new Macbay jacket
In terms of discounts, Rockstar is dropping the cost of the Collector’s Bag by 5 gold bars over the next week, while the Pennington field shovel and the metal detector are 40% off this week.
Additionally, all stables are offering 30 RDO$ off Criollo horses through March 8, while the local fence in your area has dropped the cost of weapon and ammo pamphlets by 30%. All boots and vests are also on sale this week, with discounts running 30% off.
Prime Gaming
Finally, Rockstar announced that everyone who connects their Rockstar Games Social Club account to Prime Gaming gets the following rewards:
A Free Bounty Hunter License
An Award for the Trimmed Amethyst Bounty Wagon Livery
Those who link their accounts by March 15 will receive 200 shotgun slugs, 5,000 Club XP, and the ability to buy the repeating shotgun for 50% off.
The Vigil is now available on Digital and VOD and is playing in select theaters.
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Hollywood horror, especially supernatural horror, has been largely defined by Christian imagery, which is part of why Keith Thomas’ debut feature The Vigil feels so refreshing. Steeped in the Jewish tradition of shemira — the watching-over of a body from the time of death until burial — the film mines spiritual ideas which may not be immediately familiar to most goyim audiences. But Thomas’s 90-minute, one-location Yiddish and English story is so fine-tuned, and so emotionally riveting, that it feels like the work of a seasoned maestro who’s been dealing in these themes for decades.
Horror films in Yiddish are rare. Unless you count the few Yiddish lines in Demon (2016), you’d have to go back as far as Michal Waszynski’s Dir Dybbuk in 1937. Writer-director Thomas, a rabbinical school dropout, was keenly aware of the lack of traditional Jewish supernatural horror when he made the film, and he attributes this to Judaism’s comparative lack of concepts like the Christian Hell and its demonic emissaries. 2012’s The Possession comes to mind as mainstream Jewish horror, but even that film felt like The Exorcist (1973) with some specifics shuffled around.
From where, then, does Thomas mine his terrors? One answer seems obvious: the film forces its characters to look inward at both personal and cultural loss. The other answer, however, isn’t one you’d expect: The Vigil’s horror is just as technological as it is supernatural.
The story spans a single night and follows Yakov Ronen (Dave Davis), a young Hasidic man in New York who attends a support group for those who’ve left ultra-Orthodoxy behind. He feels isolated even in social settings. Money is tight, forcing him to choose between meals and medication, and he hasn’t yet grown comfortable with dating norms; his group-mate Sarah (Malky Godlman) puts her number in his phone when he can’t figure out how. There’s also something deeper troubling Yakov — something more painful than these new fears of technology and intimacy — which the film holds back on revealing until the moment is opportune. Perhaps it waits a little too long, but scenes, where the tension dissipates are few and far between
When the group session ends, Yakov is approached by his former rabbi Reb Shulem (Menashe Lustig, subject of semi-autobiography Menashe), who offers him an overnight job for a quick payday. It seems like Yakov’s money woes might be temporarily soothed, but Shulem has other motives: the job is that of a shomer, or a guardian for a recently deceased Hasidic man named Mr. Litvak (Ronald Cohen), and Shulem hopes the tradition will nudge Yakov back towards his religious roots.
Yakov agrees to the money, though not to Shulem’s spiritual advances, and heads straight to the Litvaks’ dingy two-story residence in Borough Park. Complicating matters is the fact that the widowed Mrs. Litvak (the late, inimitable Lynn Cohen) suffers from dementia, but the task seems simple enough: Yakov must watch over the deceased for five hours, until sunrise. However, something is amiss, both with the body and with the darkened surroundings. Yakov has been taking pills, so it could all just be a trick of the mind, but he soon begins to see and hear things lurking in the shadows. He also discovers that Mr. Litvak had become obsessed with a mazzik — a malevolent demon from Talmudic lore — which he believed had been haunting him, and would pass to a nearby soul upon his death. Could Yakov be that soul?
The Vigil feels like a tug of war between tradition and modernity. Yakov hopes to leave behind his old Hasidic life and assimilate into gentile society, but upon entering the Litvaks’ home, he’s immediately surrounded by traditional imagery, which reminds him of a past in which he stuck out sorely, in even in a city as multicultural as New York. One such sleep-deprived flashback involves an antisemitic attack, during which Yakov’s payos (or side-curls) and traditional Hasidic garb turned him and his younger brother Burech (Ethan Stone) into instant targets. Yakov may not bear the physical scars of this incident, but it weighs on him emotionally and makes his new buzz-cut appearance feel like an attempt to suppress this painful history.
[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=%22The%20Vigil%20feels%20like%20a%20tug%20of%20war%20between%20tradition%20and%20modernity.%22″]Jewish trauma plays a key part in the film’s creeping horrors, though strangely, some of the experiences Yakov recalls may not even be his own. The film frequently circles back to a scene from the Holocaust — specifically, an anonymous Jewish man being forced, by a Nazi officer, to do terrible things to survive — and though the film doesn’t provide a direct explanation, it offers hints that the mazzik may be able to conjure other people’s memories. The only thing Yakov knows about Mr. Litvak is that he survived the Holocaust — but no matter whose memories these are, they evoke a larger, more violent history whose specter Yakov can’t escape.
Yakov’s flashback and these mysterious World War II memories are linked aesthetically to some of the abstract, seemingly supernatural goings-on around the Litvaks’ home. The result is a narrative continuum in which intergenerational trauma defines not just the characters, but the physical spaces around them. The attack in Yakov’s past unfolded on a darkened street, and the house he now finds himself in is engulfed in shadow; when the demon first takes physical form, its legs peek out from behind a wall, evoking an image from Yakov’s flashback best left unspoiled. Similarly, the Holocaust memory involves a woman turning her head back to gaze at the mysterious man, and Mr. Litvak’s description of the mazzik (in a video he recorded) involves a ghastly figure with its head turned backward, forever cursed to gaze into the past. The mazzik’s horrific appearance is revealed slowly, and it thankfully doesn’t end up a deflating CGI-fest like many monsters of its ilk (the otherwise adept His House comes to mind). As much as the mazzik embodies physical torment, it’s also a twisted mirror to personal and generational survivor’s guilt. For the most part, the film’s scares emanate from within.
But even though tradition is where the horror seems to originate, modernity isn’t the answer. In fact, escape from tradition is framed as equally terrifying, when it involves traumas unaddressed. The question of why Yakov can’t simply leave the house is answered in delightfully gory fashion, and the film even takes a few sharp turns into tech thriller territory. At first, this feels like throwing too much at the wall just to see what sticks — strange videos, phone calls, and text messages keep entering the film’s fabric — but it slowly ends up working on numerous fronts.
For one thing, Yakov’s own perspective becomes less reliable as the night wears on (and he certainly can’t trust Mrs. Litvak’s), and as technology evolves, a digital image can be as easily manipulated as a distant memory. So the concept of truth, both internal and external, becomes increasingly hazy. For another, the film also begins to fold tradition and modernity together in intriguing ways. The camera constantly holds on dark corners and negative spaces — we love a good “What’s in the shadows?” story, don’t we, folks? — but each time the film displays texts and other media (right beside the main character, à la Sherlock or House of Cards), it overlays these messages and videos over dark corners of the screen. At first, the light emanating from them feels like a respite; Yakov retreats into his phone as a distraction from whatever he may (or may not) be seeing. But soon, even his phone — his window into modernity, and his escape from the Litvaks’ home — becomes a source of unease. The personal intimacy of texts, calls and video chats feels uncanny and uncertain when he sees and hears things he shouldn’t even on his screen. Light becomes just as chilling as darkness.
Some of the film’s techniques may feel familiar (especially with regards to jump scares), but the way Thomas & co. capture intimate spaces have a unique finesse. For one thing, the film’s use of anamorphic lenses — so often associated with either portrait-like close-ups or gorgeous landscapes — makes even empty space feel disorienting. A simple pan across the darkness, from a distracted, dimly lit Yakov to the body he’s watching over subtly distorts his own body as he’s pushed to the curved corner of the frame, foreshadowing physical horrors yet to come. Zach Kuperstein’s low-light, high-contrast cinematography is downright eerie. The few times he lets brightness enter the frame, it’s immediately turned into anamorphic flares, with light once again becoming as disorienting as darkness. Whatever the shadowy mazzik comes to represent for Yakov, there’s no escape from it.
Without getting into too much detail, the major exception to this aesthetic approach arrives at a key story moment, when Yakov decides to face his traumas head-on by finally embracing some part of himself he left behind. The scene is lit by Shabbat candles, rather than electric and electronic sources which keep flickering in and out. The candles never waver; thanks to tradition, Yakov briefly knows stability. His embrace involves him wrapping the straps of a tefillin — a black leather box inscribed with Torah verses — around his arm as the music swells. It’s a deeply reconciliatory moment, of a man finding fleeting comfort amidst emotional turbulence, and Yakov’s resolve also makes him feel a boxer taping his wrists before a dangerous fight. Although, on a deeper level, it feels like the bonds between his past and present being reforged, albeit temporarily, as he searches for a path to spiritual healing.
That aforementioned emotional musical swell is an exception too. It’s the only time Michael Yezerski’s score is populated by traditional string instruments. During the rest of the film, Yezereski fills the soundscape with a combination of deeply unsettling electronic sounds and, if you listen closely, human voices crying out in agony. The music practically saws its way through nerve and muscle until it touches bone; every element of the film is jarring on the surface, but when you dig a little deeper, it reveals something both more spine-chilling and more recognizably human.
Shapeless shadows begin to take familiar forms. Mysterious sounds begin to resemble footsteps. And the performances by Dave Davis and Lynn Cohen force their way past two-dimensional horror tropes — a troubled man who might be an unreliable narrator, and an old woman uncomfortably close to demonic conspiracies — until they become deeply moving portraits of lingering trauma, and the way grief manifests in mind, body, and spirit.
Dead by Daylight announced its newest chapter today exclusively on IGN. Titled, “All-Kill,” the new chapter is set in the backdrop of the cutthroat K-Pop industry. Both the new killer and survivor will be ready to play in the Public Test Build (PTB) later today.
All-Kill introduces the newest killer, The Trickster, a K-Pop star with a penchant for murder. Joining him is survivor Yun-Jin, a music producer at the fictional Mightee One record label. In keeping with the chapter’s K-Pop theme, developer Behaviour Interactive teamed up with Kevin Woo from the K-Pop band U-KISS and DJ Swivel, a Grammy-Award winning, Canadian music producer who has worked with groups like BTS. Both will help make sure the K-Pop industry and community are accurately portrayed.
The new killer was a singer named Ji-Woon, The K-pop star was recruited into the boy band NO SPIN by Yun-Jin Lee. Ji-Woon, who was already vain to begin with, began to feel jealous of his bandmates. One day he intentionally let his bandmates die in a fire accident.
Becoming addicted to murder (and taking some inspiration from the Joker), Ji-Woon began kidnapping victims and weaving in their screams into his music in secret. When the executives of Mightee One caught on, they restricted his creative control over his music, an insult he repaid by kidnapping the board members in an elaborate murder plot. Just as he was about to kill his producer Yun-Jin, however, The Fog called to Ji-Woon to become its next killer.
This of course sets up Yun-Jin as this chapter’s survivor. Yun-Jin was rejected as an idol trainee and instead joined the fictional Mightee One company as an intern and later became the label’s biggest hit-maker, though she was never able to take credit for her hits. Looking to turn her new group NO SPIN into stars, she recruited Ji-Woon as its newest member.
When the rest of the band died in the fire accident, Yun-Jin rebranded Ji-Woon as a solo act called The Trickster. Unfortunately for her, Ji-Woon’s violent tendencies would take him from being a K-Pop star into a killer for The Fog.
Dead by Daylight is an asymmetrical PvP game where one player controls a killer and four other survivors players must work together to escape the killer’s clutches. Dead by Daylight’s roster includes a mix of original and famous horror movie killers including Michael Myers from Halloween and Freddy Krueger from Nightmare on Elm Street.
Cooperative video games have always been a bit of a tough nut to crack, with many developers coming up with their own distinct methods of cracking them. Some games don’t separate single player from coop at all and just let multiple players go through the same campaign. Others craft a separate and typically smaller experience meant for coop play exclusively. And others still are massively multiplayer and generally expect players to group up into large parties.
But Josef Fares and the team and Hazelight Studio have a very different view of what a cooperative game should be like, and their latest, It Takes Two, is shaping up to continue pioneering this new breed of coop-only adventure games, and maybe even in the process, bring a pair of former lovers back together.
It Takes Two is a cooperative-only action adventure platformer, but even to leave it at just that wordy description is doing the game a disservice. Much like Hazelight’s previous game, A Way Out, It Takes Two largely adopts the genre of whatever the story calls for. In the first level of my demo that I got to play with Josef Fares himself, things began very traditionally with the two characters, Cody and May — a divorced couple that get transformed into dolls by a magical book of love — awakening in a workshop shed. With Josef taking control of May and me guiding Cody, we had to make our way through the shed, hopping over boxes and chasing after a runaway fuse using all the familiar 3D platformer fundamentals: Double jumps, wall jumps, butt stomps, and so on.
The platforming itself controls well and the challenges are pretty straightforward, but where It Takes Two really shines is when it introduces segments that require coordination and cooperation between the two players. A real standout is the latter half of the first level where May picks up a hammer while Cody grabs a nail. With the hammer, May is able to swing across gaps, but only if there’s a nail sticking out of the wall. Cody meanwhile is able to throw and call back a nail, leviathan axe-style, and can use them to not only give May grapple points, but also pin objects to the wall. It’s a fun dynamic that could probably be further developed into its own coop puzzle platformer game, but here it’s just a small slice of a larger cake you just eat a quick bite of and then move on to the next one.
Another fun genre shift is when Cody and May get wrapped up in a war between squirrels and wasps and are outfitted with a pair of complementary guns: Cody’s shoots sticky flammable sap, and May’s launches matches to ignite said sticky flammable sap. Much like the hammer/nail segment, there’s a really fun process of each character having to figure out what their tool is capable of, communicating that to their partner, and then coming up with a way to figure out how to use the tools in tandem in order to find a way out of the room. For example, obviously the sap gun could be used to explode a barrier when ignited, but if left alone, the sap could also be used to weigh down certain objects, opening up a path for May to jump across a gap. May could then also use this knowledge to remove weight from something by igniting the sap to further open up the path.
The demo wrapped up with an exciting chase that had May in the gunner seat of a plane as Cody piloted their way out of the wasp’s headquarters. Once again, it was a segment that relied on careful coordination as the gunner had to not only fend off enemy planes, but also had to clear a path for the pilot by burning down barriers that blocked off an escape route. And if that wasn’t enough, the level concludes with an epic fight against the squirrel commander atop the plane in the style of a 2D fighting game, which filled me with all kinds of jealousy as I was relegated to piloting the plane while Josef got to style on this poor squirrel.
It’s not all just cooperative, buddy-buddy, fun though. A lot of the enjoyment that arises from true coop games are the laughs had when, whether intended or not, a moment of betrayal sends you flying into a puddle of death, or crashing into the abyss when that nail you thought would be there suddenly gets called back, or locked in a torture box with no way to escape other than the other player letting you out. Needless to say, these moments are inevitable in It Takes Two.
And if these moments ever cause you to get to a point where you just wanna have it out with your coop buddy, much like in A Way Out, there are also a number of competitive minigames that you can face off against each other in. The one that I got to play was a variation of whack-a-mole where I was the mole and got points for keeping my head up, while my partner got points every time they managed to whack me. It was a lot of fun, and I got to make Josef sweat, because even though he beat me, it was only by one point in a come from behind win.
All in all, It Takes Two is shaping up to be exactly the kind of follow up to A Way Out that I was hoping it would be. By designing a game that is uncompromisingly intended to be played with two players and two players only, Hazelight is able to play with coop mechanics in ways that haven’t really been explored in any other game quite like this. Thankfully, it will also come with a friend pass system that allows a player who owns the game to invite someone to play with them regardless of whether they own the game or not. So start thinking about who the Cody to your May will be, or vice versa, because It Takes Two will hit PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PCs on March 26.
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Mitchell Saltzman is an editorial producer at IGN. Follow him on Twitter @JurassicRabbit
It Takes Two is an upcoming co-op game from Josef Fares and his team at Hazelight Studios that follows a couple as they navigate the murky waters of their divorce. Unfortunately for Cody and May, it’s not going to be a clean break. Thanks to a magical spell accidentally cast by their daughter, Rose, they are turned into doll versions of themselves and must explore their own house, but from a very unique point of view.
In the above video, real-life roommates Lucy James and Kinda Funny’s Greg Miller discuss how the game feels to play, how funny it is, as well as how it manages to marry (pun not intended) gameplay and story to build a truly creative cooperative experience.
Check out Kinda Funny’s First Impressions at youtube.com/KindaFunnyGames, or follow Greg on Twitter @gameovergreggy. For more on It Takes Two, we’ve got the first 20 minutes of gameplay up on https://youtube.com/GameSpotTrailers, as well as a chat with the game’s director, Josef Fares on gamespot.com. It Takes Two launches on March 26 on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.
They say it takes two to make a thing go right, and that’s certainly the case in It Takes Two, an upcoming co-op game from Hazelight Studios, developer of A Way Out. In it, a divorcing couple is accidentally turned into a pair of dolls, and they need to break the spell and return to their daughter, all the while navigating through their impending split.
The above video is the first 22 minutes of the game, beginning with the couple telling their daughter Rose that they’re breaking up, meeting self-help book Dr. Hakim, and parkouring their way around their garage.
It Takes Two launches on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S on March 26. To see more from the game, check out youtube.com/GameSpot where we play with Kinda Funny’s Greg Miller, or check out our written preview here on GameSpot.com.
The next game from Hazelight Studios, It Takes Two, is a pretty big departure from its first game. The developer found success with A Way Out, its co-op-only crime drama about two men who work together to break out of prison, and which sported choice-based narrative branches. You wouldn’t expect its next game, then, to be a puzzle-platformer romantic comedy about a couple on the outs who find themselves magically transformed into dolls, forced to navigate the shrunken worlds of their messy garage and vast backyard.
But It Takes Two handles the change of pace with surprising grace. Hazelight showed off the game with a hands-on preview session, which gave us a chance to try it first-hand. Like A Way Out, the game is presented wholly in split-screen, requiring two players to work together and rely on each other. But even through the first few hours, It Takes Two is a funny, well-acted narrative game with a surprising amount of cooperative depth and variety.
The game centers on May and Cody, two parents who have just told their daughter Rose that they’re planning to divorce. Rose immediately leaves her parents to go play, but instead, makes a wish on a relationship self-help book that her parents might work out their differences. In a scenario straight out of a movie like Liar Liar or Freaky Friday, Rose’s wish, coupled with a few tears, turns out to have magical powers, and May and Cody find themselves transported into the bodies of Rose’s dolls. As they struggle to try to catch up with Rose to get the wish undone, they’re constantly hounded by Dr. Hakim, the cheesy self-help book fixated on forcing the two parents to find common ground once again.
Co-op works exceedingly well with that premise, as one might expect, since while Cody and May bicker back and forth, they’re also forced to work together to succeed. As it turns out, the romantic comedy genre seems like a perfect fit for the kind of co-op game Hazelight creates.
“How many games are actually in the rom-com genre? Some, but not so many,” said Josef Fares, Hazelight’s founder and game director. “Even in movies, it’s a pretty hard genre to really wrap your head around, but eventually we ended up with something really cool where we can create this super cool scenario with these two parents.”
In our hands-on time, playing as two tiny dolls, my co-op partner and I had to make our way through the couple’s garage, where May and Cody met more than just a talking book with a Casanova swagger. In the game’s first level, they encountered an antagonistic broken vacuum cleaner Cody had pledged to fix and never got around to dealing with; in the next, May’s decrepit tools needed help escaping a rusting toolbox. The whole game carries something of a Toy Story meets sitcom vibe–most of the problems revolve around the everyday problems of a couple whose relationship has deteriorated, but with elements like a talking hammer and an angry, giant boss vacuum.
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Each of the levels is significantly different from the last. In the vacuum level, puzzles constantly had to do with the flow of air, with one player jumping into a vacuum hose, only to be launched out the other end. The second player was often tasked with grabbing the launching end and aiming it to make sure the first didn’t immediately plummet to their death. At other points, May might activate and reverse fans to keep Cody floating over a deadly pit until he could clear a gap, before Cody had to repeat the process.
Once we got to the level with the tools, however, just about everything had changed. May gets ahold of the head of a talking hammer, which can be used to bash objects, while Cody gets a set of nails he can throw at targets and recall with a whistle. Cody’s nails provide anchor points that May can swing from using the hammer, so a lot of the puzzles had Cody providing May with a path across a gap so that she could then provide him a way forward.
Fares said It Takes Two never repeats a major mechanic from level to level–it’s unified through its platforming controls, but it’s constantly throwing something new at you to go with them–and that variety is a key sticking point of the game. Those mechanics are all created in concert with the storytelling, ensuring the gameplay feels like it’s essential to the story, and vice versa.
“Sometimes I have a sense that it’s almost like the writers and the designers are on two different games, if you know what I mean,” Fares said. “So what we’re doing is trying to combine those, trying to make use of gameplay, even if we use it as a metaphor.”
The cooperative aspect of the game plays into that approach as well. Fares said he gravitates to making co-op games because of the drama inherent in having two characters on screen at the same time instead of just one.
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“When you have two characters that are very different, and even mechanically play different, the dynamic between them creates a way more interesting story,” he said. “I mean, you see that in all stories. So that’s definitely a reason [I keep making co-op games]. It’s also, I like to f–k with the player’s mind a little bit. It’s kind of fun to twist and turn and do stuff that’s not expected. Sometimes it’s even more interesting what goes on on the couch, or with the attraction between the players and characters, because people actually connect to the characters they are playing more than I expected, even. So from that perspective, you can do a lot with the story.”
But telling a story through a cooperative game can be tough because, by its nature, the game is designed to get players talking to one another, rather than listening to a story. Fares said that’s one of the challenges he deals with as a writer, but he tries not to be too precious about the writing–as long as the players get the gist, he said, he’s happy. It Takes Two accomplishes that by putting its major narrative beats in cutscenes that players can watch, while adding characterization through banter between May and Cody as you play. Even if you don’t catch every line of dialogue between the characters, their conversations quickly give you a sense of their relationship.
And as mentioned, what plays out on the couch is part of the storytelling experience too, Fares said.
“Sometimes the game becomes a game when the audience starts to play it,” he explained. “In A Way Out, it was very clear–without going into spoilers–we really created some intense moments for the players sitting on the couch. I still, till today, can get very pissed-off people that contact me and say, ‘You son of a bitch, what did you do?'” Like really angry. And it’s a true compliment for me. I’m like, ‘Wow, we really did something.'”
There could be a fair number of those moments in It Takes Two, just judging by its size. Fares said It Takes Two is around 12 to 14 hours long, but it also contains a lot of opportunities for May and Cody to take a break and just play together. There are several points where you can find minigames on short side paths, allowing you and your co-op partner to compete with one another. Fares said there are something like 25 of those extra minigames, in addition to everything you’ll encounter as part of the narrative, with each logging wins and losses so you can see who’s coming out on top.
In the portion we played, it was pretty impressive how many inventive puzzles It Takes Two presented, culminating in giant boss fights. But things never got overwhelming–if one character died, they almost immediately respawned, and in tougher moments, like boss fights, the dead player could hammer a button to speed up their respawn. Fares explained that Hazelight worked hard to make sure puzzles were just challenging enough to maintain the pacing of It Takes Two, without becoming frustrating. It also seems that, like A Way Out before it, even players who aren’t diehard gamers should have a fun time; It Takes Two isn’t so easy that even inexperienced players will be able pick it up with no issue, but it’s also not especially hardcore, either.
Over the course of the first couple hours of the game, It Takes Two nailed its cooperative gameplay with fun mechanics and intuitive puzzles, while also delivering on its rom-com promise, as well. What remains to be seen is just how Fares plans to f–k with players’ minds; you can find out for yourself when It Takes Two launches on Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and PC on March 26.
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Rock Band 4 is getting pair of DLC tracks this week, and they’re good ones. The ska songs “Superman” by Goldfinder and “Younger Lungs” by Less Than Jake will be available with the store refresh this week for $2 each.
“Superman” is an iconic earworm of a song in the world of gaming, as it was featured in the first Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater game–you can hear it again in the Pro Skater 1 + 2 remaster.
“Younger Lungs” by Less Than Jake was featured on the band’s 2012 EP Seasons Greetings from Less Than Jake. “The song is everything we love about upbeat ska-punk anthems. Bassists will especially love the bouncy basslines and keeping the beat on track,” Harmonix said in a blog post.
The two new songs will be available to buy from the in-game store on March 4.
This is the final week of Rock Band 4’s Season 20. You can get all of the season’s new DLC through the $27 Season Pass, which includes 18 songs and represents a discount over buying the tunes individually.
T.I. will reportedly not be returning for the third installment of Marvel’s Ant-Man franchise, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the musician-turned-actor is not included on the cast list for the upcoming Ant-Man sequel, which stars Paul Rudd as Scott Lang, together with Evangeline Lilly as Hope van Dyne, Michael Douglas as Hank Pym, Michelle Pfeiffer as Janet van Dyne, and Michael Peña as Luis. The reason for T.I.’s apparent absence from Ant-Man 3 is unconfirmed at this time.
T.I. and his wife, Tiny Harris, are currently facing accusations of sexual abuse from a number of women, as well as other serious allegations of “forced ingestion of illegal narcotics, kidnapping, false imprisonment, intimidation, assault and harassment.” They have both strongly denied these claims, calling the allegations “unsubstantiated and baseless.”
“Clifford (T.I.) and Tameka Harris (Tiny) deny in the strongest possible terms these unsubstantiated and baseless allegations,” reads a statement, released by the lawyer who is representing the couple. “We are confident that if these claims are thoroughly and fairly investigated, no charges will be forthcoming.” It’s unclear whether these allegations are related to the Ant-Man 3 casting news.
T.I. portrayed a side character called Dave, who was a friend of Paul Rudd’s Scott Lang/Ant-Man in 2015’s Ant-Man and 2018’s Ant-Man and the Wasp. His character may or may not have been lined up for a return in the third Ant-Man installment, however, THR’s report notes that “things can still shift, including which characters are in the script” as the movie is currently in development.
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is expected to go into production next year, but there’s a lot of MCU to come before that. After the credits roll on the WandaVision finale, many will turn their attention to The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, coming up on March 19. There’s also Black Widow, Loki, Shang-Chi, What If…?, Eternals, and the new Spidey sequel, now officially titled Spider-Man: No Way Home.
