Hazelight Studios’ “Two Persons” defeated strong competitors such as “Death Return”, “Brain Navigator 2” and “Forza Horizon 5” and won the Game of the Year at this year’s Game Awards ceremony. It may be surprising to see such smaller releases of Sony and Microsoft flagship works like this. Nonetheless, it deserves this coveted award due to its refreshing and unique collaborative experience. This work published by EA is a cooperative game only. Every player has different obstacles to overcome in his journey. This is not Hazelight’s first cooperative game, but it is definitely the best.
First of all, we must talk about the excellent setting of the game, “Two People in a Row” is described as a romantic comedy, a genre that we have hardly seen in platform games before. Here, a couple Cody and May are about to separate. They made a difficult decision and announced the news to their young daughter. Their daughter returned to her room with tears in her eyes, hoping that her parents could solve the problem between the two. Surprisingly, after this, the couple was turned into two dolls, and their differences must be put aside, first to find a way to return to human form. This core storyline is both frustrating and full of fantasy. It is really touching to watch the cracked couple mending their wounds.
We are full of praise for the novelty of “Two People” and the consumer-friendly design of its cooperative operation. If you want to play online games with a friend, your buddy can download a free buddy pass, and you don’t even need to buy the game. The friend pass can be easily found on the storefront of the platform, and players only need to get an invitation. Measures like this are rare now. After all, the general atmosphere of the game industry seems to be obsessed with enticing players to buy micro-transactions and additional content.
In terms of gameplay, you will occasionally encounter obstacles on the road, which requires you and your companions to separate and work together. The operations here are completely displayed in a split screen, so you can always see what your partner is doing, and you can also say aloud prompts. What’s better than other cooperative games is that the paths of the two players are unique. For example, in an earlier scene, May got a nail gun and had to shoot the nail into the wall so that Cody could use the head of a hammer to swing between them.
The various boss battles here bring real visual spectacles, and compared with general platform games, these provide more combat-focused contrasts. Combat is almost like solving a puzzle in nature, because you need to find the correct way to solve your opponent. Among these boss battles, the first and most memorable one is to see you face off against a sentient vacuum cleaner. Here, one player must ride on the vacuum cleaner to suck up the explosive canisters, and the other player’s task is to launch these canisters at the boss.
Given the quality of “Two Persons”, it is not surprising to understand why game director Joseph Fares was able to bet with $1,000 so confidently at the time. This is the follow-up work of “Escape from the Sky”, which represents the new gold standard of cooperative operation games. This year it is really difficult for you to find a better choice to play with family and friends. We know that the next game of Hazelight will have the same cooperative-only gameplay, but we hope that its quality will be comparable to this.
