Plan:

1. Introduce the game
2. Introduce us
3. Game play
4. Effect on the relationship

It Takes Two, a game about a couple on the verge of divorce who have just been turned into their child’s mini wooden figures and sent on a path of rediscovery to remind them of how and why they love each other. It’s a beautiful game and perfectly illustrates the journey of pulling back all the layers of their relationship to find what made them fall in love with each other and what exactly made them forget that.

My boyfriend and I, him being a WFH computer engineer and me being a busy-body and always working, thought it would be a great idea to play this game as if it was us on the verge of divorce… It got real very quickly. We don’t have a child and we’ve only been dating for 2 years, but the sudden realisation of Cody and May’s relationship in the game was eerily close to our truth and possibly gave us a glimpse into the future was eye-opening, to say the least.

The game is split into 2 characters where one player is Cody, the stay-at-home dad and the other is May, the engineer and breadwinner for the family. You are both taken through the couple’s home and shown areas of their life they have forgotten and forced to fix the years of neglect together with a series of cute and creepy characters along the way. You meet a love doctor, Dr Hakim who tell you exactly what is wrong with this relationship and once you’ve fixed areas of your house, you start travelling inwards to work on Dr Hakim’s 3 lessons to fix a broken relationship.

If you want to play a game where love wins, this isn’t the game. Love doesn’t win, hard work does. We see in the game that the couple stopped trying and that’s what turned the relationship bad. Cody let his failures get the best of him, stopped loving his garden. May is in denial about not missing being a singer when really she feels she’s missing a massive part of herself because she let go of something she loved.

Maybe other couples that played this game didn’t go through the same level of “oh shit” as we did but it’s definitely a topic of conversation when there was a few parallels. I have been a singer/musician since I was 5 but when I started college at 16, I decided to put it aside to focus on my studies. It was a conversation me and him have had before but the association with a failed relationship was a reminder of how important it is to get back into it. My boyfriend recently started his own little garden and every time I seen him he’s always showing me around his latest finds or an update on his pepper plant. He dreams of a big and beautiful garden, growing all types of produce and japanese plants he can only see when he goes home.

How did it ruin our relationship? We went from a careless honeymoon phase to a sudden snap back into reality. Love isn’t a beautiful gondola ride in venice, you’re manning a ship in the Sea of Thieves. Running around pulling various ropes, steering and fighting off the megalodon. It is constant work, even when you’re perfect for each other. If you want to grow together, you have to work together because as soon as one of you is dreaming of the life you’ll have when you’re on shore and the other is looking for where to go next, you will find yourself walking the relationship off the plank and jumping ship.