Split Fiction review

Split Fiction sets a relentless pace—one that it maintains throughout the entire 15-hour caper. To play Hazelight’s co-op adventure is to experience the entirety of a theme park’s myriad diversions while you’re on a rollercoaster: plummeting down into the hall of mirrors, leaving nothing but a trail of glass behind; hurtling through a shooting gallery, gunning down targets as you blitz past; colliding with a haunted house, spilling animatronic horrors everywhere.

Except Split Fiction’s diversions are a wee bit more thrilling than funky mirrors and cheap scares. One minute you’re solving puzzles in a fantasy realm by shape-shifting into apes and fairies, the next you’re space marines in a 2.5D sidescroller, using your guns and the power of friendship to bust into a futuristic prison. Whatever you’re doing, though, there’s usually a lot of running, jumping and flying—gotta go fast.

It is quite frankly nuts how frequently Split Fiction shakes things up—even more than Hazelight’s It Takes Two—given its unstoppable forward momentum. But this is baked into the very premise. Two aspiring authors, Mio and Zoe, have been invited to a meeting with a publisher, Radar, whose CEO turns out to be a massive arsehole and plagiariser.

Through some half-baked sci-fi nonsense, Mio and Zoe find themselves stuck in their stories, forced to work together to escape the worlds of their own creation. I say “forced” because they are far from willing collaborators. Mio loves sci-fi, hates fantasy and has no social skills. Zoe is annoyingly extroverted, loves fantasy and hates sci-fi. It’s a very basic, very on-the-nose odd-couple dynamic with two dull, broadly-written characters.

Naturally, they discover that they are more alike than they realised (I’ll let you get your gasps out of the way), and that they make a great team. Oh yeah, the thing that makes them bond? Trauma. Which is revealed through the stories they’ve written, and by playing through them together, they let each other in. It’s cheesy and obvious, but look: sometimes you just wanna see some people become buddies. It’s nice! It’s even occasionally touching.

There are benches scattered around the stories where Mio and Zoe can have a quick rest and check in with each other. Some brief bonding before the next madcap misadventure. It’s very twee, but you’d better believe my co-op buddy and I made sure to stop at each of them, hitting all those heart-to-hearts. They’re brief palette cleansers, before you hop back into the lunacy.

I confess that I did consider skipping some of the cutscenes, though—at least the ones where nothing exciting was happening. Mio and Zoe aren’t the most interesting of authors, and the story of their blossoming friendship isn’t exactly novel. You’ll see all the beats coming a mile away. Also, I wish the game would just once acknowledge that they are terrible writers—their stories are a blast to play through, but you couldn’t pay me to read them.

Co-op cocktail

Ultimately it’s an excuse to throw all sorts of world-hopping, reality-flipping, genre-switching shenanigans into the mix. Each chapter is dedicated to one of the buddies, so either sci-fi or fantasy, but they’re all from different stories, meaning that every chapter introduces new mechanics, rules and themes. And within these chapters you can find side stories—mini-levels inspired by Mio and Zoe’s short stories, which Hazelight smartly places in the other writer’s worlds, switching things up with a short detour to another genre.

This lets Hazelight pull off a convincing illusion that this is a game devoid of repetition. Just a cavalcade of endless surprises and new distractions. The reality is that you’ll tread over the same ground quite a bit, but there are frequent tweaks and wrinkles, and every activity is shuffled and reconfigured to such a degree that the illusion might as well be real.

Where there is repetition, it stems from user-friendliness rather than a lack of ideas. There need to be some consistent mechanics and concepts running through the game—they keep the brisk rhythm from becoming discordant. Even when it is spitting out a barrage of new twists, you’ll never be clueless for long. It’s always fairly obvious what you need to do—or at least how you can engage with the world.

This is not to say there’s an absence of conundrums. Indeed, there are puzzles scattered throughout the adventure, ranging from very basic rhythm games to physics teasers. These almost always lean into the game’s cooperative nature—like Mio transforming her little robot buddies into a boat to ferry Zoe’s sentient robo-ball across a series of water-based puzzles—elevating them well beyond their simplicity. Somehow, basic cause and effect feels like magic in a co-op game. “If I stand here and do this, you’ll be able to go over here and do that! It’s a miracle!” They aren’t really obstacles; they’re excuses for teamwork. And, occasionally, mischief.

Hazelight—I’m sure very deliberately—included a whole bunch of ways to troll our buddies, including commanding a giant plant to eat them, or letting them plummet to their death by taking your hand off a button. I particularly enjoyed locking my partner-in-crime in a jail cell. He deserved it. You’ll also find mini-games hidden away, which serve no purpose other than to get you cooperating and competing. Split Fiction always wants you to do things together.

You’ll always see what your partner is doing, too. While I started playing in local co-op, I was unable to get my buddy—a middle-aged dad of two, with a real job—to commit to a 15-hour play session, so we played the second half online. Even then, it was in splitscreen. The only time this vanishes is during activities where you’re always going to be right next to each other, and that transition is usually done in an extremely striking way at just the right moment.

This makes it a lot easier when you’re working together but not seeing the conundrum from the same perspective, since you can make sense of the puzzle by checking your partner’s screen. Sometimes, though, you can’t spare a glance over at what your pal’s doing, which is why my neighbours got to enjoy two men loudly shouting things like “UP! NO, TO THE LEFT! DOWN, NOW, DOWN!” at 12 am last Saturday.

Dynamic duo

Split Fiction’s dedication to variety extends to the differences between the characters, too, with each chapter giving them new, distinct powers. In the first chapter—a cheesy cyber ninja yarn about unpaid parking tickets—Mio dashes around with swords, slicing and dicing, while Zoe has a whip that can grab objects. Both are central to smashing the chapter’s challenges, and often need to be used in tandem, but the rules and mechanics governing them are unique.

In a later chapter, we got to raise a pair of baby dragons. At each stage of their life, the dragons unlock new, more powerful abilities. Mio’s dragon can spit acid and gets to fly first, which I’m convinced means she got the best dragon. That said, it was hard to ignore the whoops of delight coming from my friend, who was rolling all around the place and gleefully smashing into things with Zoe’s dragon.

There’s no time for anything to out stay its welcome, so even when there’s a dud, and there are a few, it never sticks around for so long that it leaves a bad smell. This economical use of time blesses even the simplest of activities with a freshness that keeps them entertaining.

A section where I controlled a drone that my friend was hanging from—floating him above, below and between lasers—was tense as hell and genuinely fun, but would have absolutely had diminishing returns if I’d needed to do it 10 times, or if the section was stretched out to five minutes instead of two. It came out of the blue, gave us something new to do, and then got out of the way.

It’s genuinely impressive how perfectly Hazelight has timed each section—just enough room to generate some laughs and anecdotes, a wee bit of tension, a dash of risk, and then it’s off to a jetpack chase, or a boss fight or a physics puzzle. This is not to say that everything is over in a flash. It’s more that every section is as long and full-on as it needs to be—though there’s absolutely a tendency towards brevity.

Some ugly 2.5D platforming sections aside, Hazelight also clearly knows how to make a memorable scene, and it loves a good set piece sequence. Free-falling from a drop ship into a secret facility, spelunking through the innards of an unfriendly dragon, leaping across flying cars on a sci-fi highway—the backdrops and settings do a great deal of heavy lifting, and even when little is really being asked of you, it still feels thrilling and high-stakes.

While I reckon that a lot of parts of Split Fiction, in isolation, wouldn’t necessarily stand out, the way it’s been constructed elevates the whole. And I don’t want to suggest that there aren’t some genuinely brilliant individual moments. A section where you’re working together while gravity appears to be flipped for just one of you proved to be a real trip, and I had a hoot during my short sports career, tossing an explosive ball to my buddy while screaming.

Then there are all the times the game plays with perspective in weird and fascinating ways. Just as Split Fiction keeps throwing new activities at you, it just as frequently changes how it presents those activities, altering the screen’s layout on the fly and forcing you to adapt to a different way of thinking. It’s another way Hazelight keeps things exciting and engaging—leaving your brain perpetually vibrating.

This is all leading up to an exceptional final chapter. Crikey. I will show some restraint and not give anything away, but it’s probably the raddest thing I’ve ever seen in a co-op game, building on everything Split Fiction did in the previous 14 hours, and then throwing in some new mind-fucks for good measure. This has become a bit of a theme, but let’s just say there was a lot of yelling.

It’s hard to imagine another game cramming so many surprises and script-flips into a single 15-hour romp, but I thought something similar when I played It Takes Two. Clearly Hazelight isn’t done trying to push how much it can keep us on our toes. While these two stand out as the studio’s most similar games, Split Fiction is absolutely trying to aim higher. More intense, more variety, more flash and spectacle. And it’s paid off. This is the studio’s best game—though I’ll always carry a torch for A Way Out—and one of the greatest co-op games around.