Split Fiction is a game bursting with creativity and endless fun that’s at once technically impressive and astonishingly clever at every turn.
Split Fiction is a game bursting with creativity and endless fun that’s at once technically impressive and astonishingly clever at every turn. Read More Gaming
Split Fiction is a game bursting with creativity and endless fun that’s at once technically impressive and astonishingly clever at every turn. As the headline says, Hazelight’s newest co-op adventure is the most fun I’ve had gaming in years. It takes a lot to surprise and delight me when it comes to video games these days, but Split Fiction has done both and in spades.
The game’s premise is straightforward enough. Two hopeful writers, Zoe (Elsie Bennett) and Mio (Kaja Chan) show up at Rader Publishing, eager to have their stories published. Zoe writes fantasy fiction and Mio writes science-fiction, but neither has had success in the cutthroat world of publishing.
When they arrive, not all is as it seems. The writers, along with several others, are told to put on special suits. They will be entering simulations of their stories in a device called simply, The Machine. When Mio protests, after noticing the others captured in large, glowing bubbles, the company’s founder and CEO, J.D. Rader, attempts to force her to participate, accidentally knocking her into Zoe’s bubble.
She shows up inside Zoe’s fantasy simulation. This isn’t what the company intended, and now Zoe and Mio find themselves glitching back and forth between one another’s stories while also learning about the nefarious plans Rader Publishing has for their ideas, which it plans to steal.
The game is designed to be played cooperatively, either online or locally, via split-screen (though it occasionally also plays out in a single screen). You cannot play the game alone. Sometimes forced co-op bothers me, but here it’s fundamental to the experience, much like Hazelight’s previous two games, A Way Out and It Takes Two.
Split Fiction takes everything the studio has learned from those games and expanded on it in the most creative and frankly jubilant way imaginable. This game is simply bursting with creativity and fun at every turn. No two stages are the same. One stage takes you on a high-stakes futuristic train heist, zipping through the air in space-age squirrel suits before splashing into the water on cyber-waterskis. The boss you fight on this level plays out like an old side-scrolling arcade game, harkening back to classics like R-Type. This shift in perspective happens throughout, moving from over-the-shoulder 3D to 2D sidescroller to racing game to dance-off at any moment.
In one level, you find yourself puzzling your way through a fantasy forest as shapeshifters, solving puzzles as a fairy/ape duo. And the puzzles are all wildly inventive and unique. In one, we had to place a giant egg on a giant seesaw, then use Zoe’s magical tree powers to pull back a large branch. One player had to jump on the seesaw, tossing the egg into the air while the other let go of the log, causing it to hit the egg midair, sending it into the brambled gate ahead. Puzzle after puzzle requires clever thinking and, most importantly, collaborative effort to solve.
Then you’re off on speeder bikes, racing through a cyberpunk city at night, shooting down flying security vehicles. In a short and rather silly stage, both players find themselves transformed into pigs.
Main levels are punctuated with side-stories that offer up smaller missions in the opposite genre. So a stage that’s fantasy will have sci-fi side-stories and a vice versa, keeping the gameplay in a steady state of flux. You never get bored, though I guarantee that some of the tougher challenges will leave you frustrated. Still, time and patience and trial and error will get you through even the trickier bits, and a handy mini-game in certain areas ensures that so long as the other player is alive, you can respawn and carry on the fight.
There is limited combat here as well, though it’s less of an action game than an adventure-platformer-puzzler. I won’t spoil the story beyond what I’ve already said, but it’s very well-written and the characters grow on you as the game progresses.
Another selling point for Split Fiction is replay value. Zoe and Mio each take on totally different roles with different parts to play in each puzzle and stage and often are given quite different powers, so a second playthrough swapping characters promises a fun new experience for both players. Sure, it’ll be the same story again, but your role in it from a gameplay perspective will change entirely. It’s really quite brilliant.
If you’re looking for a new game to play with a friend, significant other or family member (I played this with my 17-year-old daughter, who fell in love with it immediately) definitely take Split Fiction for a spin. You won’t regret it.
Split Fiction is out now on PS5, Xbox Series X and PC.
