In 2026, It Takes Two still casts a long shadow over the co-op aisle. Hazelight Studios’ genre-hopping adventure remains a go-to recommendation for players who want a campaign built around two people bickering, cooperating, and occasionally piloting a giant space baboon. Years after release, its Pixar-esque charm, mechanical variety, and the wonderful Dr Hakim keep it in the conversation. Yet one scene refuses to stay politely in the background. It is the literal elephant in the room: Cutie.

The setup is simple enough. Cody and May are divorcing parents transformed into voodoo-doll versions of themselves after their daughter’s sadness works some storybook magic. To return to normal, they decide their daughter must cry. Since her tears helped create the spell, tears should undo it. The game asks players to accept this logic with the same straight face it uses for talking books, sentient vacuums, and a squirrel with a vendetta. Fine. Cooperative games run on dream logic, and It Takes Two runs faster than most.

The uncomfortable part is how the plan escalates. Cody and May conclude that breaking their daughter’s favourite toy will do the trick. That toy is Cutie the Elephant, and in the game’s world of living playthings, Cutie is not a plastic lump. She is a character. She whimpers. She runs. She hides. The game spends a long stretch reminding players that Cody and May intend to kill her, often within three or four steps of each other. Neither parent seems troubled by the ethics. May doubts the plan will work, but her objection comes from an engineer’s brain rejecting magical logic, not from a mother’s conscience about harming her child’s beloved toy. That distinction matters.

It Takes Two sets up a perfect rug pull. Players expect the game to swerve, to reveal that the parents cannot go through with it, or that the plan was always a bad idea. The swerve never comes. Cody and May go through with it, and the sequence is far more gruesome than its cute art style suggests. Cutie flees into a cardboard rocket. May hurls a projectile and sends the toy crashing down. Cutie’s leg gets stuck; players mash buttons to pull her free, tearing the leg off in the process. Then comes the dragging, the grabbing, the impaled ear, and the fluff that spills like stuffing from a ripped cushion. It is a horror-film beat wearing a plush elephant costume. The tonal pivot lands like a birthday cake with a fire alarm baked into it.

And then the plan fails. Cody and May remain dolls. Aside from a shrug of disappointment, they move on with startling speed. There is no lesson, no reckoning, and no real character development from the moment. The game could have used Cutie to explore the selfishness buried inside divorce, the difference between adult needs and a child’s happiness, or the guilt of putting a partnership’s collapse above a kid’s sense of safety. Instead, the scene plays as a grisly gag with a loose thread hanging off it. The sequence is a trapdoor hidden under a bouncy castle: players are having a lovely time until the floor gives way.

To be fair, It Takes Two is not a solemn drama. It is a buddy co-op game about teamwork, absurd set pieces, and two people learning to tolerate each other again. The Cutie scene is memorable precisely because it refuses to be tidy. It is also a stress test for co-op trust: one player may laugh nervously, another may stare at the screen, and both may wonder what kind of parents the game is asking them to root for. That discomfort is part of the point, even if the execution leaves a sour aftertaste.

In 2026, the scene still reads as one of co-op gaming’s most audacious tonal swerves. It does not ruin It Takes Two, but it does leave a splinter in the game’s polished surface. Hazelight’s creative director, Josef Fares, and his team clearly wanted players to feel something unexpected. The result is a narrative U-turn made in a shopping trolley full of cutlery: loud, clumsy, and impossible to ignore. It Takes Two remains a terrific co-op ride, but Cutie the Elephant is the moment where the ride briefly turns into a haunted house. Players remember it for the same reason they remember a great magic trick gone wrong: the rabbit is gone, the audience is laughing, and nobody is entirely sure whether that was the plan.