Split Fiction, the new game from It Takes Two developer Hazelight Studios, doesn’t do anything particularly new. The game is a straightforward co-op adventure that strings together disparate sci-fi and fantasy games like links on a chain. If you bundled together the sci-fi and fantasy sections as separate entities, they wouldn’t form a cohesive experience in either gameplay or story. And the overarching narrative that connects them all is a pretty heavy-handed (though necessary, in today’s climate) parable about the rapaciousness of generative AI tools and the creative bankruptcy of the executives that develop them.
Nevertheless, there’s an ironic genius in Split Fiction precisely because it takes so many little gameplay elements that I’ve seen and done before and executes them with a brilliance and polish I have not.
In Split Fiction, you and a partner play as Zoe and Mio, two people who have come to the curiously named Rader Corporation under the auspices of getting their stories published. But — gasp! — instead of getting paid, they get trapped in a machine designed to extract people’s creative ideas. After mishaps and shenanigans, Zoe and Mio are forced to work their way through virtual simulations of each other’s stories in hopes of stopping Rader’s plan to “own” all stories to exploit for profit forever. It’s about as subtle as a brick to the face, but what do you expect from the studio run by the guy who said, “Fuck the Oscars”?
Split Fiction is an obligate co-op game. For this review, my husband Travis and I hopped between Mio’s futuristic cities and Zoe’s fantastical kingdoms like walking through the cars of a passenger train. In each section, we got a new set of powers designed to work only in that particular world.
For one level themed around shapeshifting, I had the power to turn into a magical ape and an otter, while Travis could transform into a fairy or a Groot-like tree creature. We had to use our different forms with their different abilities in tandem to navigate the world. My ape form smashed obstacles that impeded our path, while Travis’ Groot form manipulated the environment to create new paths forward.
In one of the sci-fi sections, I… wait, I actually don’t remember. Let me go look.
Oh, yeah. I got a sword that slashed enemies and also functioned as a kind of personal gravity manipulator while Travis toyed around with a whip that pulled enemies and other objects toward him. In that memory lapse lies my one complaint with the game: the moment-to-moment gameplay dissolves in your mind like so much cotton candy.
Mario’s powers in Super Mario Bros. Wonder, like the elephant power-up or the drill hat, were so distinct and unique that they carved out their own place in my memory of the game. There’s a reason people can recall Titanfall 2’s Effect and Cause or Halo 2’s Gravemind levels by name. Split Fiction has none of that. Yes, it’s fun in the moment and is an immensely enjoyable experience overall, but the things you do in it and the story it tells are so generic they’re immediately forgettable. Travis and I finished Split Fiction in 12 hours stretched across daily play sessions over the last week. And though we rolled credits just yesterday, neither of us could recall with any certainty any of the powers we had in the first five hours of the game.
But, honestly, that’s okay because it’s not the gameplay itself that makes Split Fiction as enjoyable as it is; it’s the co-op experience. Most co-op games we’ve played aren’t true cooperative experiences, and we wind up playing a game separately together. But Split Fiction is strict as hell, requiring precise communication and execution while being forgiving enough that players at different skill levels (say, parent and child) can still play together.
Our favorite moment in the whole game was where he and I essentially played two-player pinball. We navigated the level — I controlled the paddles and launcher, he controlled the ball — while a boss chased us. We had to give each other directions about what paddle I had to flick or precisely when he had to jump while outrunning a murderous robot, where one mistake or missed timing would result in death. There’s something so good about talking with your partner through a high-stakes task. Cliche as it sounds, it felt like our minds and bodies had melded together like the Jaeger pilots in Pacific Rim. It was honestly kinda sexy.
It was also really fun how our character choices mapped exactly to our personalities. I chose Mio, the sci-fi writer, while Travis was Zoe, the fantasy girl. Like Zoe, my husband doesn’t care for sci-fi, but his lockscreen and desktop background are an ever-rotating gallery of old-school high-fantasy art. Meanwhile I, like Mio, get annoyed with my husband and Zoe’s indefatigable cheerfulness and can watch Interstellar, Sunshine, and Event Horizon on repeat. It was really cute.
While Split Fiction’s story is largely forgettable, we both enjoyed its telling. The game is littered with references to so many other games, and it was fun pointing them out. I’m a big sap, so I enjoyed seeing my husband get excited about a reference he caught. I got such a kick when he recognized the legally distinct Halo 2 section or started happily shouting, “It’s Battletoads!” during a boss fight. I’ll also say the game’s final boss fight had the innovation I had hoped to see more of throughout the game itself. I won’t spoil the specifics because it’s a nice little parting gift to players, but it was a trippy, exciting sequence that played hell on our visual perception.
Since we played It Takes Two together, we were looking forward to Split Fiction also having little minigame breaks in the middle of the narrative. Split Fiction’s version of that were side stories where Zoe and Mio would pop out of the main story to have a short adventure in another world. Travis’ favorite was a creepy-cute Fall Guys-inspired level where we played as anthropomorphic teeth, while mine involved sketches of characters progressing through a story where all the action was being drawn in real time by a giant pencil.
We loved Split Fiction because, along with its predecessor It Takes Two, it’s the only modern game my husband and I can play together that doesn’t leave us wanting to kill each other. The gameplay was simple but required a level of cooperation that was deeply satisfying to pull off. It’s a cotton-candy ass game, and I won’t be able to tell you a specific thing about it in a week other than it’s fun, but that’s fine. We like cotton candy because it tastes good, not because eating it is a particularly memorable experience.
Split Fiction launches March 6th on Xbox, PlayStation, and PC.
