It Takes Two Review 2026: Still the Co-Op Benchmark Five Years On

Opening

The best co-op game released in the last decade cost £19.99 and came out in 2021. It Takes Two still holds that position in 2026. Josef Fares and Hazelight Studios built a mandatory two-player adventure where every one of seven chapters discards its mechanics entirely and replaces them with something new: hammer-and-nail traversal gives way to magnet puzzles, time manipulation, and a four-hour miniaturised Rose’s Room sequence that functions as a game inside a game. Split Fiction arrived in early 2025 and pushed Hazelight’s scope further, yet It Takes Two’s combination of mechanical invention and emotional grounding has not aged out of relevance. With a free Friend’s Pass included in every copy, over 20 million copies sold, and a Game of the Year win at The Game Awards 2021, this is the co-op game that five years of competition has not displaced.

Game Snapshot

It Takes Two: Presentation and World Design

It Takes Two is not one world: it is seven consecutive ones, each built around a single emotional beat in Cody and May’s fractured marriage. The family property, which spans a garden, a tree house, a clock tower, a snow globe, and eventually the attic where the story resolves, does not function as an open space to explore. Each chapter is a contained environment built entirely to serve its mechanical premise. The garden shed, scaled to the size of insects, becomes a space of asymmetric tools and vertiginous drops. Rose’s Room expands into a dense playground of toy kingdoms, book worlds, and a space sequence that would not feel out of place in a different game entirely.

The visual style is bright and readable, designed above all else for clarity during co-op play. Character models are expressive without being photorealistic, and the animation work on Cody and May as dolls gives them personality that the motion-captured human versions cannot quite match. Hazelight’s art direction prioritises legibility at every turn: hazards are readable at a glance, interactive objects signal themselves clearly, and the screen-split implementation (both horizontal and vertical options) keeps both players’ cameras oriented independently without confusion.

Navigation is largely linear, though each chapter hides small minigames and collectible moments off the critical path. The pacing between set-pieces is tight. The visual identity shifts dramatically chapter to chapter, which prevents any single aesthetic from overstaying its welcome. Players looking for a different kind of environmental variety across short chapters will find comparable section-by-section reinvention in Resident Evil Requiem.

It Takes Two Review: Gameplay and Co-op Design

The central design decision in It Takes Two is also its most radical one. No mechanical system introduced in one chapter carries over to the next. Cody and May receive a unique asymmetric ability set for each chapter, spend a few hours exploring and extending those abilities, then discard them entirely when the scene changes. The Shed gives Cody a throwable nail and May a hammer with a rope swing. The Cuckoo Clock gives Cody time rewind over objects and May a clone she can teleport back to. The Snow Globe revolves around magnet polarity. Rose’s Room rotates through six or seven distinct mechanics across its four-hour runtime.

The co-op design runs through every system. No mechanic functions solo. The rope swing only works when one player anchors and the other swings. The magnet chapter requires players to swap polarities in real time to solve traversal puzzles that neither could navigate alone. Communication and coordination are built into the fabric of the game rather than bolted on. This is the specific quality that has no direct equivalent in the co-op catalogue: the game is not designed for two people to play simultaneously, it is designed to be impossible any other way.

The difficulty sits at a considered middle register. Platforming sequences demand precision, boss fights require pattern recognition and timed coordination, and failure sends players back a manageable distance rather than a punishing one. The 25 minigames scattered through the campaign offer competitive diversions (arm wrestling, nail shooting, wasp racing) that work well as palette cleansers without derailing momentum.

Mechanical variety at this scale introduces one genuine risk: some systems are thinner than others. The time manipulation chapter’s puzzles resolve quickly, and one or two minigame sequences overstay their point before the game moves on. These are minor frictions in an otherwise relentlessly inventive campaign. For players who want to extend the co-op session into something longer and more systems-heavy, the best co-op games on PS5 in 2026 provide the context needed to place It Takes Two within the wider catalogue.

Story and Characters

Cody and May are a couple in the process of divorce. Their daughter Rose, trying to repair things with a homemade spell and two cloth dolls, inadvertently traps her parents’ consciousnesses inside those dolls. What follows is a journey back through their shared history, guided by Dr Hakim, a sentient self-help book with an aggressively optimistic manner and an unearned confidence in his own methods.

The emotional premise is earnest and effective in places, particularly in the early chapters where the miniaturised scale makes the domestic setting feel genuinely strange. Cody and May’s dynamic shifts from resentful to collaborative as the mechanics require, and the game earns several of its quieter moments through environmental storytelling rather than dialogue. The attic chapter, which closes the game, lands its emotional beats with more restraint than the chapters that precede it.

Dr Hakim functions as comedy relief and exposition delivery. His presence is more polarising than anything else in the game. The jokes land unevenly. The character’s persistence in scenes that earn their gravity undercuts what the writing is trying to do. The game’s treatment of the divorce narrative draws criticism from some quarters for its resolution, which sidesteps the harder questions Rose’s setup raises.

The story never achieves the weight it occasionally reaches for, but it does not need to. The emotional throughline is functional and specific enough to give the chapters meaning without demanding that players invest deeply in Cody and May as characters. It is a workable frame for the mechanics, and mostly it works. Players drawn to the family-and-relationships premise who also want a solo experience will find a similar emotional register in God of War: Sons of Sparta.

Value and Longevity

At £19.99 / $29.99, It Takes Two is the most accessible entry point in Hazelight’s catalogue. The Friend’s Pass, included free with every purchase, lets a second player download and join the game at no cost. One copy covers two players across the entire campaign. That changes the effective cost calculation considerably: splitting the purchase price between two players brings this below £10 / $15 per person.

The campaign runs 11 to 14 hours for a focused playthrough, with completionists adding a few hours for minigames and hidden moments. There is no post-game content. No New Game Plus. Replayability comes from replaying with different co-op partners rather than from mechanical depth that accumulates across runs.

EA Play and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers can access It Takes Two at no additional purchase cost. The game remains on EA Play’s library and is accessible through Game Pass Ultimate’s EA Play benefit, which makes it available to a substantial proportion of console players at no extra outlay.

Hazelight’s follow-up, Split Fiction, arrived in early 2025 and represents the studio’s most technically ambitious co-op work. For anyone who finishes It Takes Two and wants more, Split Fiction is the natural next step. But It Takes Two’s specific combination of emotional grounding, mechanical invention, and accessible price has made it the co-op recommendation that runs across every platform for five consecutive years.

Technical Notes

It Takes Two runs cleanly in 2026 across its supported platforms. On PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, the game targets 60 frames per second with no notable performance issues. The PS5 version carries an install size of approximately 43 GB, which is generous relative to the visuals but consistent with the breadth of distinct environments.

The Switch version requires approximately 9.5 GB of storage and runs at a reduced resolution and frame rate compared to home consoles. The physical Switch release requires an additional download. For handheld-only players, the Switch version is functional and complete; for anyone with access to a PS5 or Xbox Series console, the higher-performance versions provide a noticeably sharper and smoother experience, particularly during split-screen play where both cameras need to run simultaneously.

The build is stable. No persistent bugs or stability issues are reported at current firmware. The game has received no major post-launch patches that alter the core experience, and the version available in 2026 is effectively identical to the launch build. Split-screen implementation offers both horizontal and vertical options, selectable in the menu at any point. For a broader view of which console platform handles co-op and family titles best in 2026, the best PS5 games guide covers the full range of options currently available.

Final Word

It Takes Two remains the best argument for co-op as a distinct design discipline rather than a feature added to a solo game. No chapter asks one player to wait whilst the other solves a puzzle. The magnet snowglobe sequence, where Cody and May must coordinate polarity flips in real time across a shared traversal puzzle, is the kind of moment the game produces consistently and that comparably-priced alternatives cannot reliably match. Skip it only if you have no one to play with: the Friend’s Pass solves the cost barrier, but there is no solo mode and no workaround for the requirement that two people sit down together. For anyone with a co-op partner, this belongs on the list of best cosy games of 2026 and holds its place among the best Switch 2 games available. Five years without a true rival is not an accident.

For the best co-op and solo cosy games on PS5 and beyond, see our PS5 cosy games hub and the full cross-platform cosy guide.