“Two Can Play” has a little bit of everything we love about Ali Hazelwood’s writing

“Two Can Play” was one of the first stories written by Ali back in 2024, but different from her first best seller, this one was released as an audiobook. Therefore, years later, last February to be more exact, the book was released for Kindle and with a hardcover version.

In this story we follow the game designer Viola Bowen in what has a lot of potential to be a terrible retreat with her studio’s archrival. And her studio’s archrival also happens to have her enemy Jesse Andrews as its game designer. Both designers have an intricate history of encounters in game conventions, companies events and wedding parties.

The big objective of the retreat is for both studios, whose employees also have a history of not getting along very well, to show they can work together to launch a new game of the successful franchise Limerence.

The story follows the same path that other enemies-to-lovers stories Ali has written: the protagonists can’t even look at each other, but are forced to work together and as time passes they discover that everything was a misunderstanding and enjoy the rest of their time madly in love. In other words; is everything we love!

Since this book is actually a novel the story is short (sadly), but Ali was able to give us everything we like the most: a hard working and funny female protagonist and a yearning handsome nerd male protagonist. It’s just so satisfying how in love our Jesse is for Viola that I feel sad for myself for not having Viola’s luck.

Regardless, I know that a lot of people sometimes complain about Ali’s books having the same kind of story with different covers, but I honestly love her books because of this. It brings me so much comfort reading a new book knowing what I will have in the end of it. And sometimes, this is all we want and need at the end of the day.