I went in almost completely blind to my meeting with Josef “F*ck the Oscars!” Fares to play his new game, Split Fiction. I knew the title, and I knew that it was, to no one’s surprise, another co-op game, as has become his calling card after Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, A Way Out, and It Takes Two. That’s it. So when he fired up the build, put one of the controllers in my hand, and we started to play it together, I was probably as surprised as you were when you watched the reveal trailer at The Game Awards. It’s absolutely nothing like his previous games – thematically and most definitely visually – and it’s clear that with each new game, Fares and his team at Hazelight are giving players more and more agency over what’s happening on the screen.
If you haven’t seen the reveal trailer yet – narrated by Fares – please stop reading and watch that below right now. It’ll give a great overview of what I’ll briefly talk about (I say briefly because Fares jumped us all over the game – even to the last level! – to show off a bunch of different things Split Fiction is doing, and I don’t want to spoil anything specific. Well, except the flying farting pigs part. That was in the trailer and I definitely want to talk about that.). To recap, Split Fiction is a sci-fi, future-set game in which aspiring writers Mio and Zoe – named, Fares tells me, after his two daughters – visit Rader Publishing, a company that can bring a writer’s story to life in a sort of Star Trek holodeck kind of way. The women don’t know each other, and through a tech glitch suffered on account of the publisher trying to steal their ideas, their stories end up literally overlapping each other. That means Zoe gets thrown into Mio’s dark and gritty sci-fi world, and the pair are involuntarily thrown back and forth between that place and Zoe’s spells-and-sorcery woodland fantasy realm.
It’s a pitch-perfect premise, allowing for all sorts of gameplay, like wielding laser swords, anti-gravity boots, fireball spells, and riding on dragonback – among many, many others. I tried out a whole bunch of scenarios as Fares jumped us around from level to level. A couple of things were immediately clear: one, Hazelight has upped its game in the graphics department. Even forgiving It Takes Two’s stylized cartoonish visuals, Split Fiction looks generationally better than the studio’s last project. It’s not Hellblade 2 by any stretch, but it looks like a proper current-gen AAA game now. And two, you’re playing a proper third-person action-adventure game now, with full camera control, platforming, combat, and more. You’ll still do a fair share of button mashing and timed presses for various co-op interactions, but you are in more complete and direct control of what Mio and Zoe are up to than you ever were with Cody and May. Both of these are very good things!
As you go back and forth between sci-fi levels and fantasy levels, the game worlds completely change, as does the gameplay. Further mixing things up in an effort to keep the co-op campaign fresh are various optional side-story missions, and that’s where things really get weird. I played a bunch of them, including the rolling-ball-turned-armor-suit scenario and the absolutely hilarious stage where you fly around as pigs propelled by your own farts. I also got to be a giant fantasy gorilla, do tricks on a hoverboard down a course like a sci-fi SSX, leap past and later ride a hungry sand shark, and more. Fares said he really wants players to experience these, and if they’re all as fun and off-the-wall as the ones I sampled, then I don’t think he has to worry because folks are going to have plenty of motivation to find the next crazy optional mission.
Finally, a quick spoiler-free word about that last level Fares let me play with him: I’ll just say that it takes Hazelight’s co-op game design mechanics to a new, higher degree that impressed the heck out of me. And I’m thrilled that we won’t have to wait long to play it, since Split Fiction will have a mercifully short time between its announcement at The Game Awards and its March 6 release date for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S.
