Age Twisters Devs Say Casual And Hardcore Players Can “Have Fun Together”

Age Twisters Wants To Create A “Rollercoaster Of Fun” Between Players Published Sep 9, 2026, 9:00 AM EDT Meg is an Executive Editor and Technical Lead for TheGamer, and has been working within the gaming industry since 2014. She was shortlisted as a finalist for the GameHers Journalist of the Year award in 2022 and was a juror for the BAFTA Games Awards 2026. Some of the games and genres that Meg is an expert in include RPGs, point-and-clicks, puzzle games, and life sims. She has a particular fondness for Yakuza/Like a Dragon and Final Fantasy, especially Final Fantasy 14 (for which she used to run a weekly community column). Getting older usually means losing abilities rather than gaining them, but Age Twisters has decided to flip that idea on its head. Piccolo Studio’s upcoming co-op adventure stars a grandfather and granddaughter who can swap between different stages of their lives, with each age giving them different abilities and ways to tackle puzzles. I played Age Twisters at Gamescom, and unsurprisingly, messing around with the age-swapping mechanic was one of the first things that won me over. Afterwards, I caught up with Piccolo Studio co-founders Jordi Ministral and CEO Alexis Corominas Barrueco to talk about where the idea came from, how the team approached making every age feel useful, and what it takes to build a co-op game around two characters from very different generations. Age Twisters Turns Ageing Into A Co-Op Playground The team wanted a “universal concept” that everyone can connect with, and that’s why they chose the painfully relatable concept of ageing. The team started with stereotypes: older people fall over and are grumpy, whereas younger people are lazy and don’t want to work, and that’s present in the protagonists, who Ministral describes as “a very typical grumpy, stereotypical old man” and a “typical girl that challenges everything”. From there, they created the story of this grandad and granddaughter duo following a mysterious note left by the granddaughter’s deceased mother. Each wears a special bracelet that lets them transform into a kid, a young adult, an adult, or an old person, and each age has different abilities to help progress through the game and overcome obstacles. For example, when the characters are old, they can’t jump over big gaps, so you’ll need to switch to a younger age to navigate gaps. Because the game focuses on ageing, instead of normal damage, Age Twisters features age damage. While affected by age damage, you will slowly become older or younger depending on the damage type, and you cannot manually change your age. Age too much and you become a skeleton; age too far backwards and you become a baby. Either way, you’re incapacitated, but your teammate can revive you. There’s even friendly fire, so if you pick up one of the weapons that deals age damage, you can accidentally shoot your partner. Or even do it on purpose just to mess with them. Aren’t co-op games all about causing each other to rage? These age weapons can be used to affect the environment too; you can grow or ungrow palm trees, turn a carnivore plant that chases you into a baby plant, or turn a dinosaur into an egg. There are other items as well, like a disguise so you can walk around as a cactus, a suitcase, an invisibility cloak, and some items can be combined with the skills of certain ages. Each age also unlocks a special ability, and as they’re a family of inventors, the kids whip up some tech to let them swap places. You can swap with each other, with enemies (both alive and dead), and chickens. I’m sad to say that I was particularly terrible at aiming for the swap, and so inadvertently killed Corominas Barrueco many, many times. I’d have death looming over me, go to swap with a chicken, and accidentally place him directly in the path of doom. Sorry! The young adults can slow down objects with their music, adults can punch and destroy objects, while the older characters can magnetise and grab metallic items in the environment. Switching between ages and utilising their different abilities and strengths, you and your partner will overcome different challenges. You might need to navigate twisting conveyor belts, herd a bunch of chickens into a coop, or play basketball. “The ultimate goal is to create this rollercoaster of fun, you know, between players, so they bond,” Corominas Barrueco says. “And you see that the skill, we have worked a lot, so a casual player and a hardcore player can meet together and have fun together. And it doesn't matter if I put one chicken inside the yard and you put four. It doesn't matter. We did it as a team, right? And we failed. And when we failed, it was funny.” Piccolo Wanted To Swap Melancholy For Laughter Age Twisters is the third game from Piccolo Studio, and Corominas Barrueco tells me that the first two were “sad, melancholy” and “quite sombre”, so it was refreshing to create a game with “plenty of humour”. “We want to explore emotions, and fun is an emotion. Laughter is an emotion. We already did sad and melancholy and all that. Here we wanted to talk about something new and use different rules. Because we want to bring people together. Bringing them together through humour is much better,” Ministral says. The first two titles from the Studio, Arise: A Simple Story and After Us, were also both wordless, and while Corominas Barrueco says the team loves environmental storytelling, “here we have thousands of dialogue lines. It's fun to do.” All of the dialogue within the game is dependent on which age the characters are at the time. The team assures me there is no “branching story”; it’s just the contextual dialogue that changes for an added layer of detail. From the moment I saw the trailer, I was getting a bit of an Akira Toriyama vibe, so I asked the team about it, and Corominas Barrueco confirms the style is “Pixar and Toriyama blended together”. Age Twisters is a mandatory co-op adventure that can be played locally or online, and offers a Friend’s Pass so you can purchase it once and give your friend the pass so that you can both play with a single copy. Considering how many times I accidentally murdered my co-op partner during my relatively short demo, I’d say Piccolo is already succeeding at making failure part of the fun. Between turning each other into pensioners, swapping places with chickens, and inevitably blaming your partner when everything goes wrong, Age Twisters seems very well equipped to cause exactly the kind of co-op chaos I love. Released 2027 Developer(s) Piccolo Studio Publisher(s) Krafton Multiplayer Online Co-Op, Local Co-Op Number of Players 2 players Genre(s) Action, Adventure, Platformer, Puzzle, co-op