"Double Shadows: The Enigmatic Realm", Third Time's the Charm? | Discover Good Games

Text | Xue Dexing, Yan Yu

Editor | Liu Shiwu

Four years ago, just one month after its release, It Takes Two exceeded one million in sales. With its long - awaited co - op experience and excellent game quality, it won the Game of the Year at the TGA that year and almost became synonymous with co - op games. However, when we talk about that TGA, most media and players' first impression of this award is that it was like choosing the tallest among the short ones.

In contrast, it "broke through the circle" in China.

Producer Josef Fares once said that nearly half of It Takes Two's sales came from China. More intuitively, it has a peculiar symbiotic relationship with the Chinese video game store industry.

This reminds me of something: One day three years ago, my friend and I accidentally visited a video game store in my hometown, a fifth - tier city that didn't even have a Luckin Coffee at that time. To our surprise, five out of the only eight machines in this small store were running It Takes Two. The store owner said bluntly that half of his customers came for this game. During the busy winter and summer vacations, there might not be enough game discs.

What he said next completely changed my perception of this industry. His store was actually opened because of the popularity of this game. It can be said that It Takes Two came first, and then a number of console game stores emerged in China like mushrooms after a rain.

Even now, you can still see customers who are enthusiastic about It Takes Two in video game stores of all sizes. In the rest areas of some large shopping malls, on some self - service video game machines connected to imitation XBOX360 controllers, you can also see it in the most prominent position on the screen. Passing young people, either out of curiosity or to kill time, can simply take out their phones to scan a QR code and experience it for half an hour at a high price of dozens of yuan.

It's not an overstatement to say that this is a popular hit game among the people - but after all, four years have passed.

Many of the video game stores that opened because of It Takes Two have closed down due to management problems. I've also played the first level of this game with five different gaming partners. Both video game stores and players need a new co - op game and some new stimuli.

Under such high expectations, Hazelight Studios' next masterpiece, Double Vision Odyssey, arrived as scheduled. As we expected, it quickly reached a new commercial milestone: it took only two days to exceed one million in sales, and it has a 98% positive rating on the Steam platform.

Double Vision Odyssey

Even the picky media didn't stint on their praise this time and tried every means to praise this game to a new level. Many game media such as GameSpot and IGN gave it a full - score evaluation. As of now, the average media score is over 90, which is the only one this year.

It seems that Hazelight is going to achieve both fame and fortune this time.

After a complete 3 - day and 16 - hour experience, we indeed felt the unique charm and great gaming fun in Double Vision Odyssey. Some of its innovative designs even opened up infinite possibilities for co - op games.

It can be said that it has almost secured a nomination for the Game of the Year at this year's TGA in advance. However, some flaws in the game design also make us a little worried about the future of Hazelight's co - op games with split - screen.

"The Most Familiar Stranger"

For players who have played the previous game It Takes Two, Double Vision Odyssey may be "the most familiar stranger" to them.

The familiarity lies in that Double Vision Odyssey almost completely replicates the gameplay design and successful experience of the previous work. The game builds its framework with the most basic platform - jumping and puzzle - solving, and blends in gameplay elements such as shooting, bullet hell, racing, action, stealth, and party games, switching back and forth like a carousel.

The production team, HazeLight, seems to have traversed the entire history of video games using the exhaustive method, extracted all the gameplay elements, and after modernizing them, scattered them throughout the more than ten - hour game process.

The strangeness lies in that, compared with the well - paced game rhythm of the previous work, Double Vision Odyssey this time chose to go full - throttle without ever hitting the brakes. Josef bombarded the players' attention with continuous fast - paced gameplay changes for more than ten hours.

The game is mainly divided into eight chapters. Except for the prologue tutorial chapter and the last ending chapter, there are six different main scenarios.

In the second chapter, players will become cyber ninjas, operating Mio and Zoe to use katanas and gravity hammers respectively to fight their way through a neon - filled cyberpunk world. In the third chapter, they will transform into a ground - pounding gorilla, a swimming arowana, a gliding elf, and a powerful treant, using different transformation skills to cooperate and solve puzzles... In the subsequent chapters, a host of classic game playstyles such as 3D shooting, side - scrolling shooting, and three - dimensional pinball will also appear one after another.

Just when players get familiar with one gameplay, it disappears immediately and is replaced by a new one, keeping players constantly fresh.

Game screen

In addition to the diverse gameplay, the art design of each chapter in the game also has a distinct style. There are neon - filled cyberpunk cities, mysterious and misty fantasy forests, cold and dangerous future factories, magnificent dragon kingdoms, intricate spaceships, and eerie and gloomy lost castles. The visual style, color tone, and lighting design of the main scenario in each chapter are very different.

Producer Josef is not satisfied with this. In the six major chapters, he arranged several small side - quests with art styles completely different from the main storyline to adjust the game rhythm.

In the science - fiction main storyline, the side - quests are all fantasy; in the fantasy main storyline, the side - quests are all science - fiction. There are a Hogwarts - style magical world, a candy world that makes people's mouths water, a sandy dune world, a quiet and dangerous zero - gravity space, and a playable art sketch. Each one is a visual spectacle. These unique but delicate art scenes are like hasty passers - by, staying in the players' game experience for only five or six minutes and then disappearing forever.

Game screen

Through such continuous gameplay switching and visual changes, Double Vision Odyssey has established a fast rhythm comparable to short - form videos, acting like a black hole of attention that makes players unable to take their eyes off it.

Behind this, it means that the scenes painstakingly created by the employees over a long time will only be seen by players for a few minutes. In the game industry, which increasingly emphasizes material reuse and development efficiency, this is almost going against the trend.

Moreover, the gameplay design of Double Vision Odyssey has an old - school feeling of early 2000s video games. It focuses on creativity, is polished repeatedly, and simply serves the game experience. There are no micro - transactions, no DLCs, and no reskinned monsters. This very old - school handmade feeling is rarely seen in the increasingly industrialized game industry, except for Nintendo and some extremely excellent independent games.

However, as a game produced by EA, it has an industrial flavor everywhere. Whether it's the exquisite art materials and modeling or the next - generation lighting effects, Double Vision Odyssey maintains a first - class level in the game industry. In addition, Double Vision Odyssey focuses more on the performance effects and cinematic storytelling. A series of magnificent scenes bombard our eyes one after another, making us overwhelmed and extremely satisfied.

For this reason, the development cost of Double Vision Odyssey has more than doubled compared to the previous work, and the engine has also been changed to Unreal Engine 5 to ensure better graphics and lighting effects. The development of the entire project also took more than three years, which is no less than that of a mainstream 3A game.

Game screen

It has both the small - scale and delicate handmade feeling and the industrial - scale grand visual spectacle. In today's game industry, Double Vision Odyssey is almost unique. Coupled with the continuous attention - bombarding brought by the luxurious game playstyles and art scene changes, it's not surprising that Double Vision Odyssey has achieved both good word - of - mouth and high sales.

The Balanced Game between Creativity and Difficulty

If that's all, Double Vision Odyssey would just be stretching the strong points of the previous work to the limit and providing a better experience. However, in the last chapter of the game, Josef used his creative inspiration to push the fun of the game to a whole new level and even opened up new possibilities for co - op games with split - screen.

From A Way Out to It Takes Two and then to the first seven chapters of Double Vision Odyssey, HazeLight has used 2.9 games to cultivate a default paradigm for co - op games with split - screen among players.

Divided by the split - screen line in the middle of the screen, each player can only perform various operations on their own half. At most, in some cooperative scenarios, they can obtain some additional information from the other player's interface to help solve puzzles. This boundary, except in some non - split - screen scenarios when the production team removes it, will always stand between the two players, completely separating their game spaces.

But what if this paradigm is broken by itself? (The following paragraph involves spoilers for the ending)

This is the moment when Josef's creativity shines the most in the game. In the last chapter of the game, the isolation effect of the split - screen line is completely broken. Two different worlds, science - fiction and fantasy, are presented at both ends of the screen. At the same position, there are deadly lasers in the science - fiction world, while it's a smooth path in the fantasy world. And the two players can shuttle back and forth between their own game spaces and the other player's game space to solve puzzles.

Shuttling freely between the two spaces also makes the cooperation between the two players more harmonious.

Even more, Josef completely liberated this split - screen line. There may be one, two, or it may appear in any position. The previous thinking inertia is completely overturned, and new gameplay emerges with this creative inspiration. Players who have played the last chapter will surely have higher expectations for HazeLight's next work.

More importantly, with such a burst of creativity, Hazelight Studios still well controls the playing difficulty of Double Vision Odyssey, which also allows the cooperation between the two players to get more positive feedback.

Many times, good creativity tends to increase the playing difficulty accordingly. After all, new gameplay also means new learning costs, and more interesting creativity often corresponds to more complex gameplay.

I believe those who have played must be familiar with this pillar.

Hazelight actually well coordinates the cooperation difficulty and the creative part, and the degree is just right: veteran players won't find it too boring, and ordinary beginners won't be so frustrated that they quit. This undoubtedly preserves the game's general audience base and its position in console game stores.

In the levels that show creativity but are more difficult, Double Vision Odyssey's strategy is not to please beginner players by sacrificing and simplifying the gameplay operations. This approach is very likely to weaken the game's attractiveness in terms of gaming significance, and players will also lack the positive feedback from overcoming difficulties and will find it hard to enter the flow state, and finally quit the game. Instead, it chooses to "relax the standards" by optimizing the operation feel.

A typical example is the "catching bombs" mission in the side - quest. Both players need to throw and catch timed bombs back and forth while parkouring. That is to say, they not only need to pay attention to the bomb's explosion time but also accurately complete the throwing and catching during the obstacle parkour.

This challenge is actually quite difficult to control the difficulty, and it's easy to make players feel trapped.

The point where Hazelight relaxes the standards is that the adsorption range of the bombs is very large, and there is automatic locking assistance for the strength and direction of throwing the bombs.

Combined with a very good throwing and catching feel, the final result is that even as beginners, we seem to have completed some cool operations!

Compared with highly cooperative games like Overcooked (also jokingly called the "Break - up Kitchen"), the cooperation difficulty of Double Vision Odyssey is still in a very reasonable range. The busyness of the former made me and my friends quit after just a few levels, while the latter always makes people feel that "one more try and we'll succeed".

Another detail is that Hazelight basically won't let difficult large - scale levels appear in pairs.

Every time a "big problem" is solved by operation or brainpower, there is always a simple section to relax the mood afterwards, such as pulling hooks or jumping on highly - adhesive plum blossom piles. They always let players have a pleasant journey before facing the next challenge.

HazeLight uses such a design to keep players in the flow state throughout the game and also makes the two players get closer through continuous positive feedback from cooperation.

Excellent Cinematic Storytelling, but...

Although producer Josef is from a directorial background, the clichéd and mediocre script and the lackluster gameplay storytelling have become the shortest plank in the bucket of Double Vision Odyssey.

The game's two protagonists are a pair of complementary - personality writers. One is an introverted realist who likes science - fiction themes, and the other is an extroverted romantic who likes fantasy themes. They gradually get to know each other and form a deep friendship during this unexpected adventure. And in the process of supporting each other, they gradually get out of the shadows brought by their original family traumas.