Split Fiction’s loopy fun co-op will make or break your relationship

When director Josef Fares announced Hazelight Studios’ “next thing,” Split Fiction, at The Game Awards, he prefaced the adventure game as “some next-level shit.” Given Fares’ hat trick of narrative-driven co-op game successes in Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, A Way Out, and 2021 Game of the Year winner It Takes Two, Hazelight set a high bar for itself with its action-heavy sci-fi-meets-adventure two-player game. And yet true to Fares’ word, Split Fiction pushes co-op gameplay to dizzying new heights while anchoring itself with a prescient story about how game developers — despite being treated like an expendable commodity in today’s climate — are the lifeblood that makes video games art. 

Zoe, one of the game’s dual protagonists, is a bubbly, extroverted writer who prefers creating whimsical fantasy tales, and her counterpart, Mio, is a reserved, introverted writer who enjoys crafting edgy dystopian sci-fi epics. Both are dying to get their work published. When the pair answer the call to participate in an experiment from a prominent video game publisher, they quickly discover that the cutting-edge machine they volunteered to test run is designed for the sole purpose of siphoning their creative ideas directly from their minds. Hijinks ensue, trapping the strangers in each other’s stories, with no hope of retaining those stories unless they work together to escape their mind-hacked circumstances.

Split Fiction takes things up a notch beyond even Astro Bot with its homages to games like Mega Man, Dragon Age, Contra 3, Crash Bandicoot, Prince of Persia, Halo, and more, with a grab-bag assortment of levels and a sprinkle of Hazelight-branded weirdness to boot. Mio and Zoe gain new powers with each passing level as they ping-pong between both of their writing genres. Zoe’s fantasy-themed games were fun, lighthearted romps where we platformed across ancient towers with the power of light, skipped through legally distinct Candy Land vistas before battling a satanic mechanical doctor, and rode the backs of dragons we reared from eggs. Mio’s levels were grimdark dystopian fiction where we dodged bullets through floating streets (and buildings) on motorcycles, participated in gladiatorial combat against giant mechas, and sleuthed our way through a secret facility as transforming orbs. 

Serendipitously, I played Split Fiction with my partner, who likes high fantasy like Dragon Age, while I fancy space adventures like Mass Effect. In addition to having matching personalities to Mio and Zoe, our play session had the added bonus of Split Fiction serving as our first couch co-op game. In concert with past Hazelight games, Split Fiction’s difficulty ceiling is heavily dependent on the level of gameplay chemistry between its players, as well as their patience for a ton of trial-and-error deaths to figure out its platforming and combat. If there was ever a time to call a game the Dark Souls of its genre, our co-op experience with Split Fiction was it. Despite being together for the better part of four years, our gamer meeting of the minds might as well have been Split Fiction on expert difficulty. I’m bad at giving directions without sounding curt, and my partner doesn’t play platformers, doesn’t play shooters, and has dyscalculia — a disability that makes it difficult for her to get her bearings on spatial directions at a moment’s notice. 

In short, callouts like “to your left” or “look up” led to many a menacing patient “honey,” with our “yes, dears” verging on the tone of a Sekiro death prompt as we each resisted the urge to throw our expensive DualSense controllers at the wall whenever we both died. Fortunately, like Mio and Zoe, we rallied, eventually coordinating the heroines’ revolving door of powers in each level like a well-oiled machine, and figuring out each other’s blind spots (about five hours in). My partner’s job was intuiting solutions to puzzles and nailing the timing for side-scrolling jump patterns, and my job was locking in on action sequences and figuring out our shorthand language for callouts like an aerobics instructor yelling “grapple hook,” “jump,” “hold,” “you,” “me,” and “stay alive.” We’d pause the game and swap controllers to help each other if worst came to worst. 

Split Fiction pushed my partner and me out of our respective gamer comfort zones. What’s more, Split Fiction’s cooperative gameplay never felt phoned-in, with interactive levels that facilitated gameplay synergy (and tons of trial-and-error platforming and boss fight deaths), clutch timing, and a lot of trust in each other — all elements that cranked the dial to 11 in its stunning final act. Every encounter increased the complexity and difficulty of its cooperative play with creative spins on split-screen camerawork as we glided through the air on wingsuits, grapple hooks, hoverboards, or on the backs of dragons with swords or laser guns. Every cooperative victory — involving us flexing our brain muscles to solve environmental puzzles, or overcoming multi-phase bosses in tandem like trapeze artists catching each other midair — had us relishing our hard work. 

Split Fiction falls short of being a complete knockout gameplay experience thanks to the tiny font size of its text. Despite the game’s inclusion of accessibility options, which allow for fine-tuning Mio and Zoe’s gameplay settings from either pause menu, the bane of my partner’s and my experience was sussing out the tiny text button prompts and locating crosshair reticles in Split Fiction’s busy, set-piece-heavy platforming and action sequences on our flat-screen TV from our couches. Split Fiction’s tiny text also worsened the moments when the game’s camera switched on a dime from top-down, side-scroller, isometric, and over-the-shoulder camera angles while throwing neon lights and explosions in our faces. It made that text feel less like an accompanying firework to its genre-bending medley and more like a flashbang weakening the emotional payoff of its dual-button-mashing finales.

Niggling frustrations aside, the team at Hazelight also succeeded in weaving stirring emotional beats between its roller coaster ride of action and platforming set-pieces with the budding friendship between its leads, be it with Mio’s anxiety-fueled space mission to escape deadly supernova rays of a dying sun or Zoe’s lighthearted romps about how sausages are made from the perspective of flying pigs who fart rainbow trails. Split Fiction does a good job poking fun at sci-fi and fantasy cliches without ultimately making a mockery of what makes them fun and challenging games worth beating and reclaiming ownership from the game’s big bad. Mio and Zoe’s story coalesces with the two helping each other confront and overcome past traumas and celebrating how their lived experiences serve as the cornerstone of their art. 

Laden in the DNA of Split Fiction’s roller coaster thrill ride is overt snark at the current state of the games industry. Taking a page out of Hi-Fi Rush’s playbook, Hazelight’s designers have crafted a prescient and extremely on-the-nose commentary about how developers are treated as commodities for bigwig executives to praise in company memos about the talent they brought to their team in one sentence while hand-waving their layoffs in the next as a part of a broader corporate strategy to build even better games without them. 

But Split Fiction doesn’t settle for being just a tongue-in-cheek comedic callout on the dire state of the games industry. The game’s story also injects hope by emphasizing the importance of the talented individuals behind games as the true magic that makes Split Fiction’s medley of genre-spanning levels enjoyable — not the big-name corporations attached to them. Creating a thrilling co-op game that pushes the genre forward, tests the strength of players’ friendships, and advocates for game developers is truly next-level stuff.

Split Fiction will be released March 6 on PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on PlayStation 5 using a pre-release download code provided by Electronic Arts. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.