Inside Hazelight at the climax of Split Fiction’s development, you can see how the seeds of a Game of the Year are sown
Video games are a business. But they’re also made by, about, and for people. Video games are products. But they’re also art, and I won’t hear anyone argue otherwise. This is the complicated and often contradictory paradigm at the root of our medium, and most big-budget modern entertainment forms. How a given production chooses to navigate these choppy waters often defines it.
In many of the best cases, the route charted through that contradiction is often most keenly defined by one thing: culture. That’s what I’m most curious about when I step into the headquarters of Hazelight Studios, the company behind 2021 Game of the Year and critical darling It Takes Two. What, exactly, is the atmosphere of a studio in the final stages of development on a follow-up to a Game of the Year winner? What’s the secret sauce?
As I hypothesized, I really do think it’s about culture. At the risk of sounding like that infamous article’s opening paragraph musing on auteur creators, Hazelight is definitely a studio defined by the identity and attitude of its founder, Josef Fares.
Fares is a little bit scrappy, with a braggadocious attitude that always manages to land on the charming side of things, rather than the arrogant side. Sitting down to play the studio’s latest game he pokes his head in, impeccably dressed. “Are you ready to blow your f**king mind?!” he asks, grinning. This is who he is. This is who Hazelight is. The packed awards wall in the studio lobby serves as a perfect validation of this attitude.
At the same time, though, it isn’t all about swagger. Nestled in a part of Stockholm, Sweden that’s home to several towering office blocks with the names and logos of video game brands emblazoned across their facades in enormous letters (Avalanche Studios and DICE/EA Stockholm are just minutes away), Hazelight is instead tucked away on the top floor of an unassuming office building. A new home acquired around 18 months ago in the wake of the success of It Takes Two, it’s easy enough once in the building for an experienced eye to tell which floor houses the game developer: it’s always the one with all the external blinds into communal areas of the building closed. As an industry, we love a bit of secrecy!
But I digress. My point is that Hazelight’s office isn’t showy; there’s no peacocking here. It’s functional, neat, smart, and even a little cozy. It belies a culture that is about more than Fares’ confident posturing, summed up in his motto of “We f**k s**t up without f**king up”. Poking around the office one can easily sense that the man has spearheaded a place with a lovely atmosphere. It’s this, perhaps, that gives Hazelight’s games their narrative tradition. These are games about connection, collaboration, and even love. Be that between friends, family, or as in Split Fiction, the bond that can develop between two total strangers in the right circumstances.
Some studio visits – and reader, I’ve done a lot of them – give little but sanitised office cubicle Severance vibes. Of course, you never can tell what the truth of working in such a place is from a brief visit, no matter how intimate. But what I can say about Hazelight is that it certainly is convincing; it feels genuine. The vibe feels right. Everybody I speak to there seems genuinely thrilled to be involved with the company and its projects.
Wandering the studio’s modest but impressive two-floor space, one gets a sense for who they are. You see the pride and the rebellious spirit pretty much everywhere. There’s a sense of how the studio still sees itself as scrappy, small, and independent. Of all the awards stacked up in the lobby, I’m told the favorite is not the 2021 Game Award that was bequeathed in front of tens of millions of viewers, but a small statue of around a third of the size from a publication I’ve never heard of.
It’s a cute and endearing thing, appearing to be hand-moulded out of clay or something. It’s delightfully slightly naff, but utterly full of heart. It doesn’t surprise me that this is Hazelight’s favorite – it’s far more representative of the studio’s attitude than an expensive, perfect, artisan Hollywood statue.
You can of course also see the humor (the location of a stack of communal umbrellas is marked with a photo of Rhianna pinned to the wall), and the cheesy family vibes (the words ‘Have a Haze-tastic day’ scrawled across a whiteboard, a photo wall packed with snaps of drunken revellers at company parties). Then there’s the dedication to punching above the studio’s 90-person weight class, best exemplified by an in-house mocap studio of impressive scope for an independent, carefully customized to best suit Hazelight’s co-op design where most cutscenes focus on dual protagonists. And I have to give a special shout out to whoever christened the studio cinema room, naming it after all-timer cinematic genius Neil Breen (IYKYK; real ones know).
“We still have this very, like, family friendly feel to it. I mean, you’ve been in our studio now. You know, someone asked me the other day – ‘what’s it like going to work’ – well, it’s just so much fun,” says Fares when we sit down to talk about his studio, its culture, and the finishing stretch on Split Fiction.
“People are having fun, laughing, and throwing out ideas. It really is f**king s**t up without f**king up. It’s like my saying, but it’s true.”
“However, we also are a very focused team. We do a lot of crazy s**t, but we also deliver on what we’re doing. We make sure that we focus on creating that experience that feels very tight, nice, and polished.”
This is arguably the most important thing. Hazelight, like Fares, is clearly laser focused. It’s true that the studio has developed a ‘house style’. Expressly, Split Fiction is the same kind of co-op action-adventure game as It Takes Two. But it’s also wildly different. It’s more ambitious, more varied, and honestly more shocking. I don’t mean that in a narrative sense – from what I’ve seen this seems like a heartwarming tale about two strangers coming together to become friends and learn more about themselves in the process – but mechanically.
Despite having now played a much larger chunk of the game, there’s not much more to say that I haven’t said in my previous preview – it surprises, it delights. On a couple of occasions, gameplay mechanics and clever little twists made me laugh out loud in a mixture of joy and incredulous disbelief. It’s the formula that Hazelight offered to secure the 2021 Game of the Year gong turned up to 11. It’s not a reinvention of the wheel, but within this familiar framework there are perhaps a thousand other very small revolutions going on besides. It feels like the sort of experience for which the phrase ‘more than the sum of its parts’ may have been invented.
I don’t think I need to go into more detail, and in a sense nor do I want to. I think it’s likely to be amazing, and a full review next month will confirm if that is the case or not. But if you want another tidbit, here’s one morsel: a sequence involving a mobile phone made me grin from ear to ear in absolute delight. A stupid, throwaway thing – but something I’ll remember for a long time to come.
“We want to go the crazy route,” grins Fares when I ask him about the frankly ludicrous number of unique mechanics I see displayed across the course of my hands-on.
“Obviously other studios look at us and what we do and go, ‘you’re f**king crazy’. In the beginning of my career when I started implementing these sorts of game mechanics… for instance in Brothers, they’re like ‘why are we doing this and not reusing it?!’ In Split Fiction, we have our side stories – those are optional. You can just skip them. A lot of these are crazy set pieces. The cool thing about that is that people ask me, like, ‘How could you put this as side content? What if people miss it?’ And I say: it doesn’t matter. If they find it, it’s going to be great.”
This guiding principle is probably the sole thing that will most define Split Fiction. While Hazelight’s previous games were peppered with gameplay variety, Split Fiction takes things to another level entirely – literally. The game gets its name from how players bounce between two fictional settings – one science fiction, one fantasy. This means that in one level you’ll be dashing through a cyberpunk dystopia on a Tron-style neo-motorcycle while in the very next you might be a spell-slinging wizard. When you return to sci-fi, this time you might be in a send-up of Contra, rather than returning to the carefully-crafted biking mechanic.
Then, in a humorous and entirely optional aside, you might whizz through the life cycle of a pig on a farm – wallowing in mud, farting to perform platform challenges, and ultimately ending up a sizzling sausage on the grill. Your last action in that stage, by the way, is to work with your co-op partner to squeeze ketchup and mustard onto yourselves, then pop yourselves into hot dog buns. Obviously. There aren’t many games quite like this. The closest comparison in my mind, other than Hazelight’s own work, is how cheeky adult platformer Conker’s Bad Fur Day bounced between platforming, shooting, hoverboarding, and more. But this makes that look like child’s play. There’s a lot of throwing stuff away after just one chance encounter – which, as Fares says, isn’t strictly common across games as a whole.
“You know, I think it could be something from my movie background,” the studio boss muses, speaking of the fact that before turning to video games he directed and wrote five Swedish-language movies.
“Even if it’s a huge, very costly scene… ‘Why don’t we reuse it?’ My answer is: if you’re watching a movie, and you’re seeing this really cool kick-ass scene… they’re not going to show it again just because it cost money!”
The Matrix only used bullet-time twice, I muse in response. “F**king yes, exactly!” Fares responds, smacking his hand off his knee. “Use it there and that’s it. It’s more effective. I think sometimes when I see cool stuff in gaming, it actually becomes less cool, because it gets reused too much.”
I get it. Part of the delight is that none of this stuff outstays its welcome. Split Fiction has a level that’s a bit like the Ball-Samus segments of Metroid Prime – and then it becomes a bit like Marble Madness, and then, of all things, one of the boss encounters from Sonic Spinball. In any other game this would be the basis of the entire product. Here it’s a single level. It feels insane, as Fares admit, but it engenders a magical feeling of discovery with each new level and mechanic.
And then there’s stuff I can’t talk about. A glimpse at one mechanic from the final stages of the game that few outside of Hazelight have yet seen almost melted my brain. It really is a concept – mechanically, technically, and in execution – that’d be the main gimmick of most other games. Here it’s a grinning sign-off towards the end. But I can’t, and won’t, spoil it. Coming back to The Matrix, I paraphrase Morpheus to say: you have to see it for yourself.
As detailed in my earlier preview of Split Fiction, Split Fiction has created a difficult challenge for Hazelight. But it’s one that the studio appears to have made look easy, even if it was extremely difficult. For Fares’ part, he describes balancing out Split Fiction’s obsession with offering up new ideas and then throwing them out shortly after – while ensuring each feels good and is well-polished – as “the hardest thing”.
“Prototyping stuff is quite fast, but taking it to the level where it feels nice – that is the hard part. In a Hazelight game, when you play combat, you expect it to play like a combat game. It’s understandable – as a player, they don’t think ‘oh, how did they have time for this’ – they just want to play that game. That makes it harder for us, but we still think it’s very important to keep the experience fresh and unique.”
But somehow, the studio appears to be doing it. Hazelight appears poised to do something that rarely happens in this industry: make a strong case for a repeat of the championship. For my money, at the very least, Split Fiction looks set to be one of the strongest games of the year. For Fares, though he has promotional duties to fulfill, he’s confident in what they’ve made – and is already itching for the next challenge. He already has his idea for his next game, and while he’s clearly not shy of the limelight, putting his voice to trailers and strutting on-stage at events, he’s also clearly someone who most relishes the act of making. The promotional stuff is obviously just an obligation.
Hazelight seems set for that future, too. During the studio tour I have relative freedom to wander, but a few areas are off-limits as people beaver away on new ideas not quite yet ready for public consumption. And there’s one thing Fares rules out changing: the studio’s size. Having grown from around 60 on It Takes Two to almost 90 for Split Fiction, Fares has a full building, a family feel, and no intention of moving premises. Rather than scale up for a bigger project or worse make cut backs after shipping (as many do), Fares now has a new mission in mind: to maintain Hazelight at its present size.
“Oh, this is it. We’re not going to get any bigger,” he says. “That’s a line. We’ve got some lines… Hazelight will not have any microtransactions, nothing – that’s not gonna exist in our games. Like, live service games… it’s just not my thing.”
In perhaps typical fashion, a comment about the nature of his studio and what they’re planning next turns into Fares tilting his gaze towards the ceiling as he considers peers and rivals across the industry – and his greater hopes for video games across the board. In this, I feel we see most clearly his philosophy, and the singular attitude which has so powerfully catapulted this man and his studio to award-winning, critical-darling status.
“In general, I hope that people just focus on making great games. That’s what people want to see. Don’t try to come up with the next big thing or whatever, you know? We can clearly see games that have failed that were trying to become this new ‘thing’. Sure, when one hits, it makes you a lot of money – but the games industry shouldn’t be only about the money.
“It should be about creativity as well. It’s yin and yang; they should meet in the middle.”
Split Fiction releases on March 5 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S.