Design Brilliance in Miniature: Unpacking 'It Takes Two's' Toy Room Level

(Please watch the "toy room" level play through from 2:59:49 to 3:03:57 before reading)

For this project, I will focus on the action-adventure platform game It Takes Two, in particular one single room that starts with the optional mini game “Rodeo” in the third Chapter Rose’s Room. It Takes Two is a rich game that spans across nine mega themes and encompass numerous minigames and mini-levels, but I found this short section – incredibly short, less than five minutes – to be one of the game’s fascinating archetype on its use of level design language. This section not only demonstrates a mastery of visual patterns, wayfinding, and layout design (parti and flow), but also has its level design perfectly complementing the theme of “toy room” and offers a super diversified player experience, including both the Eureka moment and punitive ones. I argue that this section features a parti of “pitfall”, which is a nickname I gave, and divides up the room and gameplay experience into two parts: the before-pitfall part (part 1) and on-top-of-pitfall part (part 2).

For part 1, I am going to examine how the game signals the parti in this room, i.e. “pitfall”, with both visual patterns and flow that pivot around its literal and metaphorical meanings, even before the player physically enters part 2 and develop a more comprehensive understanding of the room layout. For part 2, I am going to continue examining its visual languages and flow, with a change of focus from the parti to how this part better pairs up with the “toy room” theme and creates a joyful gameplay with spatial placement. This four-minute section has not only managed to concentrate complicated level design concepts in a single room, but managed to tackle the difficult amount of colors and ornamental details embedded in the “toy room” theme, transcending the visually exuberant room into a playable one.

The parti, or the most important space in the level, is revealed to the players from the very beginning of their entering the room if they’re careful enough. At their birthplaces of this level, he players are defaulted to the dark brown ground under Rose’s bed, facing right in front of the yellow bed frames and a glittering purple mist (as the right screen of this screenshot). The purple vs yellow contrast is very eye-catching and the player attention would automatically be directed to the center of the screen, where they have a slightly lit up view of the other side of the room. However, this view is somewhat blurry and directly blocked off by a couple of rectangular obstacles, hinting this may not be the priority of attention. If the players get this hint, they would notice a flashlight casting a much more prominent light beam from the left corner of the screen, and hopefully direct their attention to where the light points at. If they shift their perspectives rightward as in the left screen, they will see a much brighter arched view and the moving subject within that frame – a colorful pit ball waterfall and the only moving object in the entire screen. The purple vs yellow, light vs dark contrast still uphold in this new view, only that the flashlight beam is now replaced with a much opened-up view, suggesting that is the new literal “where to look at”. Upon seeing that colorful moving waterfall, its unusual design compared to more mundane-looking sundries piled up under the bed, and aware of the contrasting patterns of color and movement, the players are immediately alerted and will realize that is something important.

At this point, the player may still not be aware that there will be a literal pitfall, a sinkhole in the entire other side of the room – and the game will intentionally withhold that full knowledge for another while. As they step forward through the purple mist, step on the “speedy driver” paper board, and guided by the glowing sun light up, they will be walking on top of the block bricks.

This presents the players with an interesting dilemma as to go left or right: again, even though the players have their full technical freedom to go wherever they want, the game uses visual signals to manipulate their choice. On the right is a Disney castle, a weenie and a seemingly ultimate goal located at the far end of the room (literally circled out to make sure the players see it), a big and seemingly unbridgeable sunk place, and an impenetrable cube wall; on the left is a bunch of lovely kids’ suitcases, nicely paved and printed ground, with a car waiting its user – not to mention the big shout-out for “speedy driver” at players’ feet. Despite that there is literally no blocks on the ground to the right, the way this game present the castle, the sunk ground, and the impenetrable wall in a distance is intentionally intimidating, suggesting those goals are either too far, too dangerous, or not at the right time to reach at. And the game tricks player to choose left that is filled with more solid and thus more affirmative color, a more homecoming atmosphere with lovely toys, and the strong hints to be the car’s driver.

I made the choice to go left, and so did the professionals in this YouTube playthrough. The minigame “Rodeo” is optional and designed to not give any extra hints about what is on the other side of the room – you can see the player view is continuously blocked by the cube wall.

And it is the car and everything else on the ground that really tricks the player by serving as a trap for their “pitfall”, deliberately punitive to teach players the danger of falling as an experience goal. Naturally, two players gather around the car and fire their shots, following the default direction the car points at, the ramp, and the aiming circle in the midair. Very likely they don’t get their goal with the first try and immediately learn that they should aim for accuracy otherwise the car explodes in the air, generates an extremely loud and traumatizing sound, and kills the player driver. However, this is a relatively normal death punishment with a regular learning goal and It Takes Two took it two steps further: it’s not just the driver who got killed, but right after their respawn, the other player who released the car gets abruptly hit and killed by a respawning car that seemingly come out of nowhere – it comes from one of the cardboard boxes that is normally close shut, thus impossible for the player to understand this consequence without being through it. Every failed shot means not just one but double kill, and it is mentally exhaustive to endure the loud explosion, get suddenly hit and killed, or run around trying to avoid being hit. It is a figurative “pitfall” that has lured and got the players, and it is only the first one.

The second pitfall, again, comes as an extremely surprising explosion immediately after the player succeeds in going through the circle and gets cheered at, only this time the car stops respawning. It is unusual to get hit in the joyful moment of accomplishment and thus another deliberately educational, if not punitive, setup that nails the belief “can never fall” into their heads. Despite that this design has a reasonable experience goal, this experience still feels jarring and somewhat annoyingly spoofy, which I argue to be a second rendering of the “pitfall” on a metaphorical sense.

After the game’s manipulative use of visual signals and flow design that pivots around the literal and figurative meanings of “pitfall” in part 1, the game moves onto part 2, where all the mini-levels and minigames happen in midair or at the edge of shattered ground. Compared to more random corner objects in part 1, part 2 uses visual features to another levels by giving them patterns. The most noticeable examples are the cube designs, which spontaneously make use of color, number, and textiles for better distinguishing by the visually impaired (including low vision and color blind), and marking strong patterns with the already striking geometrical features of cubes themselves. Another pattern examples is using cracked-off edges to signal danger. And a third one that uses moving objects (falling and flowing colored, round pit balls) to signal death (compared to also colorful but larger-sized and square blocks that form the wall).

There is also one small section in 3:03:12 to 3:03:34 that I would like to highlight as a fantastic example of using level design language, both visual language and flow, to resonate the rich theme of “toy room” and enhances playability. The color pairing of the platforms that player two stand on and the colored buttons that player one controls creates the initial sense of alignment. And this diagonal placement of buttons (key interactable points that cannot be missed) and the little star shapes on them direct the player view towards the upper middle, lighter parts of the screen) here the mini level operates on flippable planks whose geometrical shapes help creates a psychological assistant mesh that aids player coordination.

Very fascinatingly, this mesh does not only operates on static visual features,  but also reemphasized as the game here controls and narrows the player movements: both players move in meshed directions on player one’s screen, with player two running horizontally from left to right and player one triple jumps on three buttons (vertically) with very short running intervals. Orchestrating both visual language and flow, the game builds a mesh that is effective both static and dynamic. The players can and are normally encouraged to run around on ground in this game, but this section plays with the spatial features to offer guidance and restriction, stimulating a player hyperfocus to the rhythmic mesh and in my opinion a Eureka moment.

Light also plays a tricky role in this short section that first of all sets up a lovely atmosphere by creating a permeating, radiating, and gentle air. Then it both directs the player one’s focus to the player two location by lightening up the entire upper two-thirds of the screen, and blurs up that vision by reducing color contrast with strong light. With this double function, light in this section subtly transitions the player focus from a more abstract first impression on the screen to the more concrete jumping-up-and-down gameplay itself. However, even with this transition, light here does not completely opts out of the view because it comes from a small window that the game deliberately places to be directly across the other side of the room. In addition to the mesh and pointed lines that connect the two players on player one’s screen, the radiation of light accompanies the vast majority of player two’s travel routes, and its radiating directions further the grid and pointed lines formulated before. As the player two moves from left to right on player one’s screen, he isn’t only in constantly change of geometrical connection with player one on the screen, but also bathed in light, making the rhythmic movements an even more joyful one.

Additionally, it would be overlooked how the visual exuberance – the rich colors and ornamental objects - both a natural result of and complement of the “toy room” theme, is in fact a more difficult subject to play around with compared to more monochrome themes - colors and rich ornamental details can be very appealing and distractive without the right amount of control. Through our analysis, however, this section of the game demonstrates a wonderful orchestration of those elements with clever visual indicators, player movement control, and light.

It is only a very small section of It Takes Two that I chose to focus on that I deemed to be a very good archetype to capture the game’s use of level design language – and through this brief four-minute gameplay, the game demonstrates such sophisticated use of visual languages, flow design, and many other concepts as to pair them with the literal and figurative meanings of its parti “pitfall”, its theme of the “toy room”, and playability enhancement. It is a fabulous piece of level design work to look at and so much more details shine through with our learnings in the class compared to my previous, simple amazement at the game, which was nothing more than a “oh lovely” comment.