Highly worth playing! I feel like this is the computer games enthusiast equivalent of enjoying a really sensitive and heartfelt cartoon (what comes to mind being Steven Universe or MLP). More to the point, there's often a lot of machismo jeering over seeing such displays of honesty and communicating sensitive information as crude and childish. I feel like by taking something so personal and painful like being trans in japan it displays a least to me how both at complete aversion to honesty or instead just sugarcoating the text as 'wholesome' and saying nothing else obscures the genuine bite underneath the surface.

Nobody in one night, hot springs gets violent or angry. Nobody dies if you make a wrong decision. The stakes are low and mundane but the rewards within the story system themselves are very high. The rewards outleap the risks in leaps and bounds, but shame creates a distortion effect where the rewards do not seem remotely worth it.

In America, where I'm playing this game from, the shame of asking a service place for particular accommodations is miniscule at best. 'Karen' customers in America come out of especially consumer privileging relationships with the service industry. American culture puts emphasis of shame instead to authenticity, employment dependency, and educational accommodations. There's a degree where which in private life there's a demand to be your 'authentic' self and that if you fail to meet up to the grand grin of authenticity you're not being a people person. However in employment life there's a degree instead to service the customer and the employer, to be everybody but yourself. Transphobia is most felt as an adult in America from the effects of employment discrimination like this.

I bring this point up mainly in relation to the zenful construction here, this cultural distinction is anticipated. Yes these considerations from the protagonist Haru are genuinely not that big of a deal to an American. For the people in Japan though these considerations are no laughing matter, bothering the system by asking for those accommodations is impolite and rude, which is a huge deal. The general impulse to a lot of these questions is 2nd hand cringe in japan, a higher likelihood to not make trouble. I believe part of what is great about this work is that it exposes within this cultural difference an implicit understanding just how hard and just how internal this process is.

I think the focus on specifically Japanese leisure experience reflects this to. The ginseng tea, clothing, and baths all have a quality of relaxing a tension. When Haru does get in a bath she mentions that she can feel the muscles in her body getting less tense. A lot of shame and self loathing itself marks itself in the body, its no surprise that Haru speaks often of being worn down and sleeping so much, and being 'too tired to talk about transgender stuff' if you refuse a lot of it. That effective connection between stress, shame, and discomfort and active bodily pain through not being able to be involved in the same leisure activity as everyone else speaks to a specific pain in discrimination that isn't generally touched on.

That's ultimately what makes the 'wholesomeness' of this text most worthwhile. It educates in the most non-intrusive way possible, hearts are deducted if you don't correct people for misgendering Haru or correcting people asking deadnames. You as the player are then implicitly encouraged by the games mechanics to go back in time and pick a different option. The game is encouraging you as much as possible to experience more. Going for the good endings is novel and going for the bad endings is just kind of boring. That doesn't mean people who got bad endings first in one night, hot springs are bad people. Instead I'm attempting to point out that such a mundane and transparent story with simple mechanics can reveal the concerns of the culture it spawned from.

There's a few different stories about particularly American reflection of trans shame. For purposes of here I'll highlight one He Fucked The Girl Out of Me, a text all about how labor relations and poverty create the blocks for shame. There is something very clearly vile and violent about that story, being around seedy people you have to fake fawning to. I believe that just as a lot of Japanese people would probably learn a lot about their cultural differences by playing that game, people outside Japan can see what one night, hot springs puts forward. Both reflect how trans people are suppressed and do it by focusing on the struggles of the mundane. Of having a tension in your muscles you cant get rid of.

Most importantly, what I love about these 'wholesome' texts is specifically how they try to bid and build networks of solidarity. In one night, hot springs being a good ally is about speaking up for discriminated people and motivating them into having a better time without pushing them, it's about communicating honestly about difficult topics. I believe that stories like this help us slowly push past the flaws of our own nation's culture and slowly build towards a necessary global solidarity.

This is why I take 'cartoons' more seriously and love them so much. The moral of the story is more complex the more you think about its wider implications and applications. Anybody who liked this game, you basically just played a really cozy episode of a TV cartoon, so think twice next time before you make jokes about bronies, otaku, or even 'disney adults' etc. They are not immature adults, they are people trying to interface with characterization and moral messages that are focused on solidarity and connecting with others. Tragic or violent art is often too stressful and reductive to those interests and so art very similar to this make it to their top 10s instead.

So for my 1000th review, I chose what I consider to be the most important brazilian game of all time. The mere existence of Unsighted is a miracle in itself, being made by 2 latinas trans women with a short budget is nothing short of impressive, considering it’s quality not only in the gameplay but also in the sprite artwork, music, and so on. How did possibly the greatest achievement in brazilian game developing history become so unknown nationally? To properly answer this question, we first have to analyze the gaming scene in Brazil.

Despite being the 3rd largest country in number of active "gamers", Brazil has a surprisingly small game development scene due to a lot of harsh factors. Hardware and Software prices tend to be too high, the government gives very little incentive in developing technological careers, and both of these have only gotten worse in the last few years by the dystopian combination that is Bolsonaro, crypto bros and Covid-19 working together. Also worth mentioning, is that a lot of programmers and artists who are into game design, straight up just leave the country whenever possible, seeking better life conditions.

Currently the most noticeable games in the minds of the average brazilian gamer, are not the likes of Dandara, Chroma Squad, Momodora or Sludge Life, who even if they don’t make your cup of tea, had a lot of effort and love put into it. The most usual names you’ll hear are the cheap ones that were made to be bad, hoping that you either play them or buy them for your friends as a joke. Kandidatos, Ultra Miner Adventures, Zueirama, and the ever infamous Bad Rats, are probably the ones that get the most recognition.

The ironic praise and fetishization of trashy national media has always existed throughout the entire world, however, I think that the extent in which it happens in Brazil is absurd, especially considering it started off as a counter movement in direct response to the enforced nationalism by government endorsed media during the dictatorship years and the “Brazil: Love it or Leave it” mentality. For decades, our most watched movie genre were softcore porn movies called “pornochanchadas”, that benefited the state by suppressing other types of movies that didn't support the regime, in perhaps the weirdest panis et circenses case I can think of.

The good neighbor policy, enforced by the american government at the time, only directly affected Rio and São Paulo as they were portrayed as the definitive tropical paradise for other first world nations to exploit. Culturally wise, the majority of the country was abandoned, which meant that the imposed nationalism had to come from within every single state, creating a sense of animosity from others, as they were perceived more as enemies than neighbors. Xenophobia became ingrained in our culture, which meant that the idea of being born in a specific state became more important than being born in Brazil itself. Mocking the idea of being brazilian while hyper valorizing your own cities had unfortunate lasting effects even after the dictatorship was dissolved.

Although the respect for other states has gotten better in the last 10 years, the disdain for the government has only ever increased as we’re facing our worst political decade yet, ranging from multiple extensive corruption scandals to a forced government takeover publicized as a democratic impeachment. However, what I think is the series of events that perfectly encapsulates our political scene, happened when our current president, Jair Bolsonaro, denied covid for 2 months after it was declared a worldwide pandemic, only to accept it’s mere existence months later by contracting it himself, only to deny it again weeks later as he was cured, claiming that his “past as an athlete wouldn’t let him die by a simple fever”.

More than 600.000 lives were lost due to covid, a number elevated by Bolsonaro’s actions and denialism. 3 ministers of health were fired during the height of the pandemic, because any measurement that went against his agenda that Covid was nothing special, resulted in them being dismissed. While most nations were trying to buy and distribute vaccines, he denied 11 deals until april 2021, with common names such as Pfizer, Covax, and even the vaccine being developed in the national territory by the Butantan institute, deemed as untrustworthy. He tried to push a chloroquine agenda, claiming it to be the true cure to covid, which to no one's surprise proved to be ineffective even before he made his announcements. Couple of months and many deaths later, Bolsonaro would end up, surprisingly, accepting a vaccine deal, which turned out later that he only actually accepted as there was embezzlement involved.

Amongst our presidential wrongdoings, the indie gaming scene flourished around the world, and although it didn’t thrive as much in Brazil, it had an impact nonetheless. Developing codes, creating digital art, publicizing media, have only gotten easier as time goes on, despite creating the unfortunate consequence that it’s more scattered around the net as ever, making so that the mere chance of a spotlight is to be considered a miracle for the average indie dev. In the last 2 years, the gaming scene was severely hit by Covid-19, however, that didn’t affect small studios a lot, especially when the amount of people working on them is as small as 2 in Unsighted’s case.

Still here after the overly simplified history lesson? Good, let’s actually talk about the game now.

The easy way to explain Unsighted to someone is that it’s a mix of Hyper Light Drifter fast paced combat alongside the limitations of a punishing stamina bar, with a metroid map progression. I’m NOT calling this game a metroidvania because it has nothing to do with the usual 2D combat, however if you think metroidvanias are more of a “feel” with progression based items with pseudo open world games, I won’t stop you. The constant back and forth of experimenting with your new upgrades is one of gaming’s greatest sensations when done right, now imagine doing that in a punishing time limit. Sounds stressful when you can’t progress in your own way? Good, that’s the main idea behind Unsighted.

After finishing the tutorial, you’ll notice that everytime you go to a new room, a small text appears in the middle of the screen telling you how much time you have left until you become an unsighted yourself, a walking android with no thought beyond primal instincts hard coded in their metallic soul. The game tries to calm you down by explaining that you can give yourself and your friends more time, with an item called Meteor Dust, which you can find by exploring, however you’ll quickly realize that giving 1 day’s worth of time is not very impactful when a day ingame happens in less than 40 minutes. You may also share them to increase your “friendship meter” to get unique rewards, which is the opposite of what anyone would do in that situation: Embracing a decaying materialism in a world that needs only solidarity.

By accepting the loot social aspect more than the emotional one, you can in theory, save more people than before, since you’ll be increasing your combat capabilities which results in you resolving the game’s conflict faster, which means you’ll be bringing salvation to even more individuals. This could also be my half assed coping mechanism that I ended up developing after letting 2 characters that were really special to the main character die, both meeting their fate because although I tried really, I ended up failing, but chose to move once again. As we all have to do sometimes.

Gear Village is one of the most comfortable hubs I have seen in gaming, facing fierce competition against Majula from Dark Souls 2 and Rosalina’s ship from Mario Galaxy. Not only it has a plethora of charming characters wandering around, but also it looks like a place I could live in, if I travel enough to the south. The androids are all visually distinct and offer different essential functions from one another, like upgrading your items, selling useful stuff, or giving you hints on where to go next.

Exploration is not obtuse in the slightest, since there’s a clear indicator in what you can and can’t do, and early on you don’t even have to get key items in a set order, so it becomes a question in how you want to approach the game. The best weapon, until the very last dungeon, and some gadgets that allow you to completely bypass some puzzles to get powerful items early on, can be obtained after the very 1st dungeon if you’ve been exploring. It’s only after a long while, that you’ll have to progress in the way the game wants you to, which is honestly pretty well executed, because it ends up coinciding, for the average player at least, to a certain “event” in the cathedral which I’ll explain later.

Fighting also feels amazing, mobility is key in this game and it feels wonderful running around. By allowing the players to never take damage by missing platforming sections, even if you have to “respawn” again, it encourages a riskier and more fun approach to both combat and puzzles. Parrying is both smooth and responsive, and also if you land it gracefully with precise timing, it restores your stamina bar fully, making it so that if you take the effort to master it, you’ll be rewarded by never having to back down from a fight. There’s also a colossal weapon arsenal to choose from, including swords, pistols, axes, shotguns, dual wielding weapons, flamethrowers, and even grappling hooks.

Well, I’m gonna get into spoilers now, so if that’s what you wanted to see from this review, have a good one, and make sure to give this game a shot, it’s worth it.

Eventually, while exploring, you’ll receive some notifications about some npc’s who have less than 24 hours remaining. The feeble, the fragile and the old ones fall victim first, however soon you’ll start to notice that the character that teaches you how to parry better and is known as the village’s chief, is also one of the first ones. And that’s when it clicked with me, that this curse comes for everyone, independent of who you are, what you’ve done, and even if you have a “past as an athlete”. While not directly being a covid metaphor, the way Unsighted handles the story, themes, and the mechanics around time being a currency, are inherently something that could only happen in our current political and social scene.

One important thing I purposefully didn’t mention until now, is that during the entire game you’ll be accompanied by a small pixie called Iris, who doesn’t exactly have much time in her hands. She greatly helps you, not only navigate and solve puzzles, but also by being your only source of actually “leveling up”. In this game, the only progression you’ll get, besides equipping discardable gears with single uses and buying expensive items to improve your healing at the cost of time, is increasing your chip slots, which might give you more health, defense, damage, stamina, etc. The fact that the only fixed progression you’ll get is tied to a npc low in time is astonishing, because it forces you to sacrifice precious time with her. Due to the nature of video games we usually don’t end up thinking much about our sidekicks, but Unsighted makes sure you know how much she’s sacrificing for you and asks you to at least keep it mutual. If you intentionally or not, let her go unsighted, your journey is not only going to be a lot lonelier, but also immensely harder, because you took her feelings, dreams, and maybe even existence, for granted.

A certain event happens when your character has less than 100 hours: she is contacted by an entity in the cathedral. There, you’ll meet a powerful person who talks like an old friend of yours that wants to “help you”, by giving you an accursed power: You can take hours away from your friends and give them to yourself. Although this might sound like a relief for some, the idea of killing your friends for your own benefit is nothing but sickening, and it doesn’t help that every single one of them was written in the story to be a good willed android, trying to survive while helping others. This is the only place in the game in which Iris won’t accompany you, as she feels a malevolent presence nearby, which means that you’re the judge, jury and executioner of yourself while in there.

You can by all means challenge her to an absurdly hard secret boss fight that will give you 10 dusts, however it not only takes a lot of effort, but also gives a reward that doesn’t benefit you as much. By working with the current dystopian system, you can guarantee yourself a safe future in this cruel world, as it’s easy to live at the cost of others, specially when your job is to be selective to who has the rights to live, however, even challenging them, won’t help as much unfortunately, as the entire fundamental aspect of being an unsighted won’t change by dethroning a single individual within a intrinsically corrupt order. There is a secret ending that requires you to beat the self proclaimed angel, however I won’t get into details because I’d have to explain a lot more elements in the story, but to summarize: You can’t vote your way into revolution, fight for what you believe in.

So now to properly answer the question: Why is Unsighted so special, even when not considering the gameplay? In an interview for Screenrant in October 2021, the devs Tiani Pixel and Fernanda Dias answered the following question “...Could you talk about what gaming was like when you were younger, and compare it to what's happening now?...” made by Leo Faierman.

“One big thing here in Brazil, and it kind of ties in with some of the discussion that has been going around lately, is with piracy. Because, for example, in the city that I lived throughout my childhood, you could never find an original game to buy. Like, it wasn't even an option. I'll be honest with you: I never saw an original PS2 game in my life, and it's common for all Brazilians. Like, I even doubt that those exist, because there was never an original game being sold here in Brazil. However, this came with a lot of positives. English is not our native language, so we received pirated games from all over the world, so there's a lot of Japanese games that are famous here that a lot of people in the US don't know, and kind of ended up being inspirations here for game designers in Brazil.”

Transforming and adapting cultures from around the world is how Brazil became Brazil. Independent if it were the natives, or the portuguese in the 15th century, or the spanish a couple years later, or the dutchman in the 16th century, or the germans and the italians in the following years, or the japanese in the 19th century, or the many other that I forgot to mention: We are in the end, a mixture of cultures from around the world, trying our best. The cultural difference between some states in Brazil is higher than the ones from entire european countries, and yet we’re all stuck in the same tropical paradise. In the end Brazil was molded by those who were molded by Brazil, therefore making something made in Brazil only possible if it was made in Brazil.

We had a lot of games in the past that captured the brazilian essence, like 171 or Tcheco in the Castle of Lucio, however those were projects made in mind to be enjoyed by mostly brazilians. We’ve also had games that tried their best to abandoned that convention, accepting their own existence as a product meant to be mostly enjoyed for those that aren’t from Brazil, but seen as the same foreign product for those that are, like Heavy Bullets or Spark. Unsighted is the first project that not only doesn’t follow that convention, but also actively tries to display such ethos for those that weren’t born here or the ones that do but fail to recognize it.

Unsighted is a game made by 2 trans women fighting not only to survive in one of the most transphobic countries there are, but also to make a project that will never get mainstream attention. Unsighted tells the story of those that struggle, for those that don’t care. Unsighted is the essence of a story forever doomed to be praised yet not seen by many. Unsighted to me, is the most important brazilian game of all time.

Forgive the analogy, but Amnesia is one of those horror games that is good and scary so long as its fiction stays wrapped round its slight mechanical shoulders. In that stage of presentation and dress, the game is a good deal fun, with startles and moody atmosphere. We can love a game about nasty castle cooridoors down which terrible monsters amble as we shiver in cupboards listening to awful sounds and an unsettling score. And the torture, the screams for help from the innocents. These are good dress. But what if it slides off and we take in the naked horror game beneath? Well, Amnesia is not very good if we consider it just like that... but that is not all Amnesia is! Right?

I want to think so. Because this is part of the show: horror games thrive and perish within a small pocket of time where you're dumb enough to believe the threats are real, before you're jaded and see the skeletal mechanics covered over by the fictional dress it wears. And just because that time passes does it mean we should forget it completely? Aren't horror games good - amazing even! - for that brief period when we still believe? I want to think of that when I think about the way games make me feel.

The game that launched a dozen millionaire YouTuber careers, helped usher the golden/cursed age of the let's play and marked a watershed moment in horror game design. Yet when The Dark Descent was busy being extolled as the scariest game evar I was that faint, squeaky "nuh-uh!" at the back of the congregation.

Despite being an avid fan of both horror and adventure games and, as a result, being an early fan of Frictional Games via the Penumbra series, I'd always been lukewarm on Amnesia and somewhat baffled by its monumental mainstream success. Besides not being scary (as I'd claim back then) it was just annoying to play through, with its sanity bar, incessant distortion effects, constant voiceover monologues that make you walk through molasses while listening, endless flashes to bright white in a game expected to be played in the dark, oil that burns out in 30 seconds and a character deathly allergic to any room with lighting below 2,000 lumens. I felt the horror gameplay was not only overly basic but bogged down with all this useless annoyance, as if they saw Far Cry 2’s infamous perpetually jamming guns and thought that’s what our whole game should be.

Well 14 years later, removed from the hype and coming off a newfound (or perhaps rediscovered) respect for this team off the back of SOMA and The Bunker I can see I was for the most part missing the forest for the trees on this. Those white screen flashes and molasses-walk voiceovers can still buzz off and the scripted distortions do drag on a bit now and then but mostly I was just too familiar with Penumbra and had grown bored with Frictional's tricks at precisely the same moment the internet got obsessed with them. With Penumbra now fading from my old man memory I can see now there’s a lot of good here that I'd been taking for granted.

A sanity bar still irks me a bit in principle because it feels like the game trying to tell me my own reaction, but not being able to look directly at enemies and mechanically making the player actually afraid of the dark itself are both genius, and having to balance two competing stats in trying not to go crazy and trying not to die adds a perceived weight to one's moment-to-moment decision making throughout. The lantern oil is particularly stingy at first but if you're even a little conservative you'll soon have more oil than you'll need, so that it's not annoying, yet very rarely have enough at once to feel comfortable. Not to mention trying in vain to keep a dwindling flame alive in the depths of darkness is a powerful visual motif in line with the sanity theme and the writing's Lovecraftian ambitions.

An organically induced fear of the dark and the management of light were near-perfected in last year's brilliant and relentlessly oppressive Amnesia: The Bunker, but we have to walk before we can run and The Dark Descent lays a solid groundwork before they were brave enough to really get sadistic on a gamer. Perhaps more notably it's Amnesia's first sequel, A Machine For Pigs, that made me rethink the light management most, in that one you can use your light indefinitely with no consequence and ironically that abundance makes it feel like something is sorely missing. In that game you never feel like you're in real danger, where here (and even far moreso in The Bunker) it never feels like you're really safe. For immersive horror that's nothing short of a triumph.

Most of all though I realize now that I was wrong about one thing above all else, and now I'm no longer too cool to admit the truth: The Dark Descent is scary. Hugging a wall, moving slowly through the dark, thinking you're really going to make it, hearing that music cue, making a break for it and frantically trying to open a door, close it again and block it on the other side is still some of the most exhilarating moments any game can offer. Frictional's beautifully wonky physics engine ensures that opening drawers never gets old and that doors will always max out your heart rate during a chase. When you're a bit fatigued with no-combat 'pursuer' enemy designs it's good to return to the masters and be reminded why it got so popular in the first place.

Puzzles mostly strike a good balance in turning your brain on enough to get the dopamine flowing without being likely to get you stuck (though I did once resort to the patented adventure game tradition of just trying every item on every other item - a jar on a string, of course, why didn't I think of that? Also that pipe wall puzzle was fucking stupid), the writing is pretty good throughout - enough to make me actually eager to be picking up another note - and the villain has possibly the most epic voice evar.

There's an abundance of muddy dungeon maze environments but somehow there's still enough variance and novelty in the puzzles and monster encounters to keep this descent compelling even 14 years, many sequels and countless imitators later. My return to Castle Brennenburg was a fruitful one beyond my expectations. It turns out sometimes it's not everyone else who was wrong, sometimes it just takes another 500 games in the log to begin to understand the genius you'd previously dismissed.

I tend to kinda hate dropping games but holy shit this game is just so boring I can't take it anymore!

It has everything in the world going for it too, aesthetically and musically it really has such a strong presentation and vibe to it. Leon himself is an interesting character with some cool movement abilities for combat and the guard MP building deal is neat as a concept. It all just ends up feeling so wasted here though.

Like one of my biggest issues with this game is just how flat and boring the level design is and how copy and paste and repetitive the whole thing feels. I dig that you can approach things in a nonlinear order BUT everything is so boring and repetitive that the game just can't support anything else. The platforming is so basic and everything becomes so boringly copy and paste that after a certain point I just didn't wanna boot the game up again, I just knew I was done and had to tap out.

At least I can see the rawest line in the entire game whenever I want elsewhere instead like why didn't the whole game have this energy guys c'mon!

i have not a speck of interest in the deepest pits of my soul to see how this game, this so intrinsically male-gazey game, handles the subject of rape. i feel like i'm watching a lars von trier movie. to be clear, i'm no prude! i don't mind - many times, i even enjoy - skimpy character designs and general titillation. i'm not rejecting this on some moral basis, either, as i enjoy plenty of exploitation media. look at a game like lollipop chainsaw. themes of SA and weird pedo shit? yes. sexualization of its main character? also yes. but the creators knew what they were making and set the tone accordingly. haunting ground's approach is the equivalent of putting jiggle physics in rule of rose. it's screaming "i have zero self-awareness" at the top of its lungs.

my belief in total artistic freedom doesn't mean i have to put up with jack shit. i see no reason to continue playing when i could be enjoying any of the 600 other video games in my backlog. i'm gonna go play silent hill 4.

silentchad2004:
using data mining, conventional mining, divination, and star charts I've uncovered shocking lore implications involving the 1999 teen choice awards, eddie's skull circumference, and the last herakleopolitan pharaohs that challenge everything you thought you knew about james. it all starts with the hex code for his jacket, which I'm sure many of you already noticed is #303828, a clear reference to the roland TB-303 commonly used in chicago acid house. to understand this better we'll first need to return to the topic of jean baptiste point du sable's whereabouts in 1780 and how they tie in directly with merikare of the 10th dynasty[...]

the fans:
obviously. it's soo obvious

masahiro ito:
😭😭😭

Really, me and my SO dropped this several months back, but that's neither here nor there. Just reminded to talk about my thoughts on this, Uhm,

I appreciate the spirit of this moreso than the end nature of it. My partner and I had a blast playing it, and the whole Honey I Shrunk the Kids aesthetic is perfect. I loved all the little minigames, the cutesy charm, all the cooperative puzzles. It's a return to this form of gameplay style from what feels like very yesteryear. If any lesson is learned from this game's acclaim, it's that there should absolutely be more of this.

I just wish the end result here was something I could champion. We ended up dropping it largely from its surrounding noxious energy. The main conceit of this couple being entrapped together fantastically to just reignite their fire for, largely implied, the kids' sake, just made us lose all of the vibes at once. Every attempt to reopen the game was spent on trying to ignore that, but it didn't really go very far. We got about a couple hours in before it became too much to tolerate, especially since the absolutely brutal incompatibilities regarding one of the two just reminded one of us of our ex. It feels like a useless story to me? It's definitely not coming from a bad state of mind, and like, it's genuine, it's earnest! But it feels almost shaming to partners who aren't working out together. All for more people going to couples therapy to see if their issues truly aren't fixable but I don't like this general idea at all, it's so "makes up a couple". Couldn't help but doctor out a story in my head that starts with this same idea but ends up taking it in a direction that commentates that maybe at the end of it some things aren't fixable and requires splitting, a far more realistic notion to takeaway that finishes off with a note that has them separating after all, with a bittersweet understanding of what they've learned from their incompatibility, rather than some, to be blunt, sickening notion of THINK OF THE KID!! GOTTA FORCE YOUR TOTAL SPARK OF LOVE (that for most people in this situation, won't be there anymore) BY MAKING UP COOP STYLE.

Honestly it's worse than the writing. We laughed together at a couple jokes, my partner found the two much much more obnoxious from sentence to sentence than me, but I'm used to it. The smarmy totally shouty couple vibe isn't like a complete mismatch for what everything here is going for. That's the most charitable I'll get with it though haha.

I'll say it takes two is good when we get the much more ambitious polycule sequel it takes three.