my gf and I have been hopping between josef fares's games recently and we managed to finish this one first, mainly because it's short and less glitchy than it takes two (I feel like we get a major connection error at least once a session). many games attempt to capture cinematic qualities but few of these ever manage to capitalize on one of the best parts of film: chilling on the couch with your bros with a movie on. one person playing through a game and another watching can be perfectly fun, but it's got an asymmetric quality to it that doesn't really involve both people in the same way. this game tries to involve two people at once with good results, as the game pulls out a multitude of tricks to keep the players engaged whether working in symbiotic roles or switching off objectives. to accomplish this, the game throws dizzying amounts of setpieces in the players' path to contend with, often with changing controls, perspective, and roles for each character. the downside of this is that there's really no consistent set of mechanics, and whatever gets introduced never has any depth. it makes the game sort of hard to describe since there's not really a unified game concept here except "jailbreak crime drama that's co-op."

what keeps this game from getting stale are the amount of new scenarios you're thrown into, whether it's random side content or just a completely different game genre. NPCs usually have some sort of goofy story that the main characters can poke around in and sometimes help push along before moving on to the next main objective. I especially appreciate how human the supporting characters in the prison section felt, which I don't feel like would've been in the game had this been american. the prison section as a whole exploits the co-op nature of the game the best in my opinion, with puzzles that intelligently use each member of the main duo, even when the puzzle solutions themselves are heavily telegraphed. later the game begins to lose focus a bit and struggles to create fascinating co-op scenarios, and here it delves the most into barebone stealth sequences or walking sim sections that begin to test my patience.

I wanted to specifically also mention the third-person shooter segments: the controls and handling are honestly totally serviceable, so where does the co-op stuff come in? it doesn't outstay its welcome by any means nor does it become samey thanks to some decent setpieces, but I really could have used some different roles for the players to fill beyond "one guy provides cover fire for the other" kind of stuff. after a whole game that felt just a hair breadth's away from a series of QTEs and minigames, what could have been a mechanical centerpiece for the co-op theme ended up just being a simple pastiche of TPS.

these are all mostly issues on a theoretical design level tho, and as it actually plays it's quite good for what it's aiming for. it legit feels like watching a movie with a friend with all of the fun interactive bits that you can only get from a video game. if anything, you can tell that hazelight has a real love for the medium and that they really wanted to capture the essence of a playable buddy movie, which is super respectable, and I'm glad this studio is committed to two-player experiences. but maybe it would be cool if sometime they try to do a really good co-op third-person shooter....