It Takes Two director Josef Fares shuts down complaints about there being - shock and horror - two women at the forefront of his new co-op adventure Split Fiction.
Hazelight studio head and the co-op maestro behind joyous platformer It Takes Two, prison escape sim A Way Out, and twisted fairytale Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons has been reacting to comments from players in a new video on Fall Damage, and Fares didn't hide his disdain for the bad apples who are mad about something as silly as having to play as a woman.
"What the f*** is this?" he said in response to a comment calling Split Fiction "another feminism propaganda-soaked game" because it has two female leads. "I guess this is someone reacting to [the fact that] there are two women. Let me just say this, in Brothers there were two guys. In A Way Out there were two guys. In It Takes Two there was one guy, one woman. And now that there are two girls everyone's complaining?"
He shouldn't even have to, but Fares went on to defend the dual protagonists, explaining that they were inspired by his own two daughters and he doesn't "care what's between your legs - that's totally not interesting to me. Good characters is what's important."
The problem is less about 'feminism propaganda' and more about the bigotry that gets pushed on almost every social media platform these days because anger leads to engagement and engagement makes money, whether the people contributing to these pages realize they're being used or not. The crowd mad about, let's say, a black man in Assassin's Creed Shadows or two women in a co-op game weren't around to complain about Barret in Final Fantasy 7 or Lara Croft in Tomb Raider - or they weren't as loud, at least - so I'm glad Fares is calling out the blatant hypocrisy.
Split Fiction, the new game from the It Takes Two devs, launches to Overwhelmingly Positive reviews on Steam and is the highest rated game on Metacritic this year
