About Tatakai:
With approximately 55,000 reviews — 96% of them positive — at the time of my posting this, it is hard to know what more I can add to It Take Two’s well-deserved acclaim. As others have said, it is an excellent cooperative multiplayer game with very satisfying controls, varied levels, and superb production values in art and audio. Aside from these things, what stood out to me was the game’s decency. It is anti-exploitative, quite deliberately excluding features like collectibles (let alone microtransactions) or character advancement that are predicated on Skinner box treatment of the player. Rather than finding ways to take more from the player (money, time, etc.), the developers have found ways to give more to the player, with many small delights to be found. In addition to not exploiting the player, the game doesn’t exploit its characters — only very occasionally playing the cheap tropes that the game’s set-up would tend to invite. The game’s narrative may lack subtlety and surprise, but its straightforward positive message never feels preachy, perhaps because the scenario is so ridiculous. The main characters are a couple named May and Cody who are going through a divorce. Their daughter, Rose, is devastated by this and desperate to get them back together. She makes a wish on a book and her parents get transformed into small wooden dolls that she made to represent them. They are thrust into a magical world where they encounter The Book of Love AkA Dr. Hakim, the flamboyant, mustachioed deuteragonist with a Spanish accent who is determined to repair their relationship. They need to get through a series of challenges so that they can return to their human form.
