The rom-com genre is not often portrayed in games. The standard formula that everyone is familiar with is a lighthearted, laugh-out-loud story in which two seeming lovers are separated by strange circumstances. At the core of the genre is the light-hearted banter between the two protagonists, and it is difficult to translate this relationship into a game. But Hazelight Studios is attempting to do just that with "It Takes Two," a two-player co-op adventure.

Cupid's arrow is an easy target, and the combination of romantic comedy and couch co-op gameplay is a match made in heaven, but "It Takes Two," the story of a couple trying to reconnect, struggles to capture the whimsy and charm of the genre.

In the game, you and your co-op partner play as Cody and Mae, parents who are magically transformed into dolls after telling their daughter of their divorce. The reason for their transformation was the eccentric Dr. Hakim. Dr. Hakim, an anthropomorphic self-help book with a mustache, devised a plan to bring the couple back together through the power of cooperation. Dr. Hakim's cheesy plan is not a very pleasant way for the couple to get back together, but with the promise of returning to their human bodies, the duo must travel across multiple worlds to break the spell and return to their daughter.

While a couple breaking the news of their divorce to their young daughter was not exactly the happy-go-lucky rom-com setting I had imagined, the world-hopping adventures of "It Takes Two" bring a lightness to the topic. In this bite-sized film, we get to explore the inside and outside of a family's home, each area with a magical realist twist. While playing "It Takes Two," my partner and I fiddled with the time inside a cuckoo clock, escaped from a ferocious mole's nest, traveled on the back of a giant ghost catfish, and had a fistfight with a squirrel on a flying plane.

Hazelight is eager to promote the variety of It Takes Two, and creative director Josef Fares has even offered to give $1,000 to anyone who gets bored playing the game. Unfortunately, such a person would not be me. That's because the cooperative gameplay in It Takes Two is really fun. Mini-games, puzzles, platforming, rail-skimming, action, and other worlds all have cooperative play at their core. In top-down RPG-style battles, you must battle through a fantasy castle as a warrior and a mage. It's as if the game was made for people with the attention span of toddlers.

Each level introduces a new mechanic designed to fit the world of the area, but even so, It Takes Two constantly switches up how it uses that mechanic. The first place they will explore is the family garage, where Cody and May are given a hammer and nail to try some puzzle-platforming. As Cody hammers the nails into the wall, May can swing them down with the hook of the hammer, but this is just one of the ways these tools are used.

There are also times when May must break a glass bottle blocking the way or hit an object with a hammer to gain momentum. Cody can drive nails into targets to keep the turntable from moving, and when he whistles, they zoom back to inventory. There are plenty of engrossing elements, and the game quickly switches to something new before you get bored with a particular mechanic. We haven't even talked about the rail scraping, circuit breaker puzzles, and clever boss fights with giant perceptual vacuums.

All of these mechanics require cooperation, so chatting with Player 2 is a must, but you can also indulge your competitive side with multiple mini-games on each level. There is nothing more fun than beating your partner at whack-a-mole and then being revenged in an ice-skating race later on. Sure, I may have resorted to physically poking my partner in the side when he was many times my lead, but I still won fair and square.

The activity in the environment was so intense that it felt like being let loose in a theme park, and my partner and I constantly called out to each other as we spotted new things. A pillow fort, a fantasy castle with a colorful ball pit moat, and an array of mini-games in the shape of her toys to get lost in.

There are lots of fun little interactions that you might miss if you rush through the game. I found so many coins that I tried to put them in a cute little porcelain piggy bank, but my partner jumped on top of it and "accidentally" shattered the piggy bank. The best cooperative games are those that inspire interaction with friends not only in-game, but also on the couch outside of the game, and "It Takes Two" does a great job of encouraging that.

Some attempts to explore why couples decide to divorce, but "It Takes Two" only skims the surface of a deep emotional climax. Divorce is a complicated and messy business, both for the parents and for the children caught in the middle, but "It Takes Two" never goes deeper than the childish squabbling of two people.

Their differences ultimately come down to the fact that one is a workaholic and the other has no passion for life and sometimes forgets to take out the trash. Also, Rose's feelings are often ignored and feel like they are only used as an end goal for why the couple should stay together.

Naturally, Hazelight wanted to keep things lighthearted to fit the romantic comedy atmosphere, but the co-op gameplay feels like a missed opportunity that could have been used to build a strong connection between the players and emphasize the story. I think Hazelight made a mistake by sticking to the rom-com genre of fairy-tale happy endings instead of delving into the more nuanced aspects of divorce and parenthood. [After all, the focus of a cooperative game should be on the dynamics on the couch, and even if the story doesn't inspire that, the gameplay in "It Takes Two" more than makes up for it. When playing online, two people can play together as long as only one of them has the game. On consoles, you can invite friends from the main menu, and on PCs, Steam's Remote Play Together support makes it easy to play online with friends.

It's refreshing to play a cooperative game that doesn't feel like an arcade game, and "It Takes Two" is one of the best story-driven multiplayer games on PC, and two players in "The Dark Pictures Anthology" and "Portal Along with the campaign, it's quite cozy. One of my favorite co-op experiences is the quiet, introspective "Journey," but if "Journey" is a co-op adventure where you don't say a word, "It Takes Two" is a co-op where you never stop talking.