A New Beginning (video game)

Lore & Background

The game is divided into 11 asynchronous chapters, with cutscenes played out in the style of a comic book. Players assume the role of one of two protagonists—scientist Bent Svennson and time-traveller Fay—during each chapter, but cannot switch between them. Each chapter consists of a series of locations with puzzles that require players to find objects in order to solve them. On PC, movement is done with the mouse: left-clicking moves the character, while holding it down on an object allows players to choose an action (such as looking at it or picking it up), and right-clicking opens the inventory to interact with items, combine them, or use them on objects.

The plot follows Bent Svensson, a former scientist living in the fjords of Norway, who is approached by a mysterious woman named Fay. She reveals she is a time-traveller from the distant future of 2500, where humanity lives underground after a global ecological disaster. Scientists determined a solar flare will wipe out remaining life, so teams were sent into the past to prevent the disaster that weakened Earth's geomagnetic fields. Fay arrived in 2050 amid ecological storms, found most teams dead, and eventually traveled further back to find Bent, who invented a biofuel based on blue algae. However, Bent retired due to health issues, and his son Duve now leads the project. Fay must convince Bent of her mission, but various parties manipulate events for their own purposes.

Reader's Guide

A New Beginning is notable for its environmental theme and dual-protagonist structure, though it received mixed reviews. According to Daedalic's Carsten Fichtelmann, Valve rejected the game (along with Edna & Harvey: The Breakout) three times from Steam, claiming their target audience did not care about the game; however, Daedalic later achieved success on the platform. The game's soundtrack, primarily composed by Knights of Soundtrack, won the Deutscher Entwicklerpreis award for Best Soundtrack in 2010. The main theme was written by Periscope Studios, with additional contributions from André Navratil, Damian Zur, Florian Behnsen, and Giliam Spliethoff. The musical styles range from orchestral underscore to 1980s Europop and lounge music. The game's legacy lies in its ambitious narrative tackling climate change and its eventual breakthrough on Steam despite initial rejection.

Did You Know?

• The game's story involves a time traveller from the year 2500, where humanity lives underground after an ecological disaster.
• Valve rejected A New Beginning from Steam three times before Daedalic achieved success on the platform.

The Architecture of Forced Togetherness

It Takes Two was built from the ground up on a single, non-negotiable principle: two people must play together. There is no solo mode, no AI partner, no way to experience the story alone. Whether players sit side by side in a split-screen local session or connect over the internet, each one takes control of either Cody or May, and the game demands that they coordinate every step forward. Hazelight Studios, under director Josef Fares, treated collaboration not as a feature but as the entire design language. Characters are frequently handed asymmetrical abilities—one might rewind time while the other duplicates herself—and progress stalls unless both powers are woven together. When a player falls, they respawn almost instantly, and during tougher encounters the downed partner can mash a button to hasten their return, keeping the flow of teamwork unbroken. The result is a game where the mechanic itself enforces the emotional premise: two people who have grown apart are structurally unable to move forward without each other.

A Marriage in Miniature

The story of It Takes Two begins at the lowest point of a marriage. Cody and May, voiced by Joseph Balderrama and Annabelle Dowler respectively, have decided to divorce. Their young daughter Rose, played by Clare Corbett, overhears the news and retreats to the family shed with two handmade dolls shaped like her parents. In a desperate act of play-acting, Rose's tears fall on the dolls and pull Cody and May's consciousnesses inside them. Their guide is Dr. Hakim, an anthropomorphic relationship-therapy book who insists on putting them through a gauntlet of obstacles before they can reach Rose. As they traverse the overgrown garden, the cluttered house, and other spaces drawn from their shared life, they meet living versions of neglected possessions that scold them for taking both their marriage and their daughter for granted. Slowly, through restoring Cody's abandoned greenhouse and helping May rediscover her love of singing, the couple begins to collaborate again. Meanwhile, Rose, believing her parents' silence means she caused their breakup, runs away. The final test—gathering an orchestra for May's performance—ends with a kiss that breaks the spell, and the family reunites at a bus stop.

From Critical Darling to Cultural Phenomenon

Critics responded to It Takes Two with near-universal enthusiasm, singling out the way its cooperative structure, mechanical variety, and narrative interlock made the game feel unlike anything else on the market. The praise translated into hardware: the title took home Game of the Year at both The Game Awards 2021 and the 25th Annual D.I.C.E. Awards, cementing its status as one of the defining releases of the early 2020s. Commercially, the game proved equally extraordinary. By April 2026, more than thirty million copies had been sold across PlayStation, Xbox, PC, and Nintendo platforms, placing it firmly among the best-selling video games of all time. Its cultural footprint continued to expand beyond the screen. In 2022, film and television adaptations were announced, with the feature film slated for release through Amazon Prime Video. The game's journey from a Hazelight Studios project—developed by a team of roughly sixty under Josef Fares's direction—to a multi-platform, multi-media franchise illustrates how a tightly focused design philosophy can resonate far beyond its original audience.

A Genre-Salad in Service of the Story

One of It Takes Two's most striking qualities is how relentlessly it changes the rules. Each chapter introduces a fresh set of mechanics tied directly to the environment and the couple's relationship, so that platforming in one section gives way to shooting, racing, flight, or arcade-style challenges in the next. Hazelight deliberately avoided repeating major mechanics from level to level, ensuring that the gameplay vocabulary always felt in conversation with the story being told. Beyond the cooperative main path, the game tucks competitive minigames into short side paths, letting the two players turn on each other for a lighthearted contest while the system quietly tallies wins and losses. Combat encounters, traversal set-pieces, and boss fights punctuate the journey, and the asymmetrical ability system—where one player might rewind time while the other clones herself—means that no two sections feel quite the same. The effect is a game that borrows from a dozen genres yet never loses its identity as a story about two people learning, again, to work as a team.