I love it when a video game makes me say ‘wow’ out loud. It’s even better when it can happen often – and such was the case in an one-hour hands-on session with Split Fiction, the new game from Hazelight Studios that’s set to once again be published by EA.
As a co-op game, my play partner for the session is Hazelight founder Josef Fares. In Britain, we’d call him a pretty flash dude. In the modern vernacular that sort-of gives me a headache, you’d say he has rizz. He’s dressed so well that I almost want to apologize that I’m coming to him from some nasty video game website and not to do a GQ profile. As a luxury watch nerd, my eyes flick to his wrist the second we shake hands. I’m sufficiently impressed.
Another fun way to summarize Fares is this: I often use my phone as my dictaphone. Once a recording is complete, Google’s AI whizzes into action and does a rough (but often woefully inaccurate) transcription of the conversation; based on that text it gives it a name. Chatting to the boss behind Flight Simulator, the AI calls the conversation ‘Flight’. Chatting to Capcom’s hunting honcho Ryozo Tsujimoto, it unsurprisingly picks the word ‘Monster’. Makes sense. My chat with Fares? That gets named ‘Shitload’. This tracks – not just because of the refreshingly colorful way the studio boss speaks, but also because of what this game is.
A shitload of stuff is very much the design philosophy behind Split Fiction. This isn’t in an overwhelming open world icon vomit way, though. Following on from the award-winning It Takes Two, Split Fiction is a linear adventure with the odd bit of side content that instead aims to just throw something all new at you practically every few minutes. The result is pretty breathtaking: like I say, it made me say ‘wow’, or some other more colorful variation of that, more than once.
In many ways, the killer philosophy here is the same one that’s driven Hazelight’s last two, or three, games. That means there is, to some extent, a risk of any new game feeling like more of the same – and that was the fear that crept into my mind when I was first briefed, before the announcement, on the nature of what Split Fiction is. But the game’s clever design, interesting setting concept, and constant search for new ideas means that this feels nothing like It Takes Two, even if at very first blush they share much in common.
The concept is essentially all about a clash of opposites. We have two protagonists (named after Fares’ young daughters, Zoe and Mio), strangers who have never met who have very different personalities. The pair have one thing in common: they are both authors. But their tastes in fiction diverge greatly: Mio is a sci-fi writer, while Zoe is about the wistful sword and sandals of fantasy.
The pair happen to visit the headquarters of some company that has shades of Assassin’s Creed’s evil Abstergo – they can put people into some brain-scanning machine that can then extract the stories in their mind and make them a virtual reality experience of sorts. Only one person is meant to end up in this machine at a time, but somehow Zoe and Mio end up in there together – and so their worlds, both corporeal and imagined, collide.
From here, the actual video game bit of Split Fiction is always – if you excuse the phrase – split between the two fictions. Get it? You’ll play one level where Mio and Zoe battle their way through some Blade Runner-y sci-fi cityscape, then in the very next they’ll tumble into a delightful fantasy forest of Zoe’s creation.
How this framework is used is utterly delightful, and plays on video game concepts and tropes in a manner that thrills. So, yes, some of the science fiction levels briefly resemble the puzzles of Metroid. But another is a more contemporary concept, dropping you into an alarmingly good recreation of a snowboarding game like SSX, complete with tricks, grinding, and scoring mechanics – it just happens to be taking place within a sci-fi level.
Fares knows Hazelight is onto something here. He grins as I sort of reel in my chair in disbelief as he keeps repeatedly opening Split Fiction’s debug menus to teleport me from one level to another, then another. Take a look at this mechanic. Now this. Now this. Games are art, right? They’re not just content. I believe that with all my heart. But this is a game with a whole lot of content – and by that I don’t mean the same thing stuffed to bursting, I mean loads of truly different content. Shitloads, if you will.
Sometimes stuff is just in here because it’s cool. Sometimes you look at it and go, “well, somebody on the team clearly likes Contra,” or “somebody thought this was a funny gag,” which is the thing that likely most often applies to optional segments that toss out new gameplay mechanics for ten or fifteen minutes, never to be seen again. Some of the more consequential design is of course driven by the co-op nature of the game, which like Hazelight’s other titles, is compulsory.
Minute-to-minute between the stuff that wildly changes for each level, you can obviously expect tight platforming, some lovely cinematic moments, pitch-perfect split screen framing, and clever little puzzles that’ll require player communication to progress. This is arguably the first hurdle for a game such as this, not all the crazy inventive stuff: but of course, Hazelight has all that down pat. This is something the developer has been practicing for some time, which is likely why they’ve been able to deliver something with such impressive depth and polish.
“I think we’re getting better and better at it, because we know we have done co-op for such a long time,” Fares says, clearly happy with my response.
“We’re almost the best in the world at what we’re doing because nobody else is doing what we’re doing – the idea of , like the written design from the beginning as a co-op. You have your single-player that does split screens and that, but none that does this from the beginning.”
All of this has led to challenges, of course. Take the snowboarding I mentioned earlier, for instance – there’s a bar of quality that Fares insists the team hits, because players are sensitive to quality of even something they only play for a few minutes.
“As a player, when you play on a snowboard, you expect it to play like a snowboard. And that’s acceptable – ‘cos a player shouldn’t be thinking – the player doesn’t know that, ‘oh, if I play a combat game like Devil May Cry, they worked on polishing that combat for the whole time’. But in this game, we can’t do that. Yet as a player, you expect it to play like a combat game,” Fares explains.
“In a sense, we’re not doing ourselves any favors. But we need to release something that’s polished and night, and that’s the biggest challenge, but that’s also the thing that we have become very, very good at within Hazelight. We can identify what mechanics we can really polish or not. Sometimes early, sometimes late, but we can kind of see better and better.”
Almost as if to demonstrate, we’re back in the demo. There’s a great trailer for the game that was shown shortly after my hands-on at The Game Awards, narrated by Fares. It’s a pretty great and explainer for a game that I actually think isn’t so easy to explain. But now Fares is going into spoiler territory, clicking through the dev toolbox like a mad-man, showing me bonkers mechanics and systems from later in the game; even from the very last level. It’s nothing I can talk about, but once again I’m rocking back in my chair, like, my god, these guys are insane. In a good way!
There are two other things I’d say about Split Fiction. It’s just about stuff the game’s approach to development and design reminds me of. The first is just – this is a game with a very Nintendo-like energy, but for the fact it’s led by a man who cusses like a salty sailor. The second is a more specifically British comparison: it reminds me a little bit of Doctor Who.
Bear with me, yeah? But the thing about Doctor Who that’s wonderful, which makes it difficult to make but also incredible, is that nothing is really predictable. Think about Star Trek. Any given episode of The Next Generation, or Discovery, or whatever, is set mostly on the ship. There’s a bunch of lovely, expensive standing sets that get used week-in, week-out. Then they beam down to a planet, a couple of scenes in front of a matte painting or green screen, a redshirt dies, beam back to the ship, more ship scenes, done. Point is, those expensive ship sets end up as the very center of the show.
By comparison, Doctor Who is bonkers. It’s a silly concept. Through a sixty–plus year history, for the most part the show’s only standing set is a single room. After that, every week is something different, something new. They build a whole planet, spend the full 45 minutes there, then rip it to pieces and never return. Months of work gets used for ten minutes and then never used again. In Doctor Who, the ship is just a tool – in a sort of chaotic way, the show has no center.
Anyway, you can probably see what I’m needling at. The Trek manner of doing things is a lot like traditional game development – while what Hazelight is doing on Split Fiction is more Doctor Who-esque – a bold, slightly mad willingness to just build stuff up, knock it down, and throw it out in minutes. The player should be left reeling by the speed at which they’re encountering new stuff – and that is by design.
In the end, this is a bit of a non-traditional hands-on. Rather than playing full levels in a natural way, it was a hands-on guided tour, hopping through tiny slices of the entire game while its charismatic director enthusiastically explained the vision. Because of that, it can be truly difficult to know exactly how the final game will stand up. But as first impressions go, it’s difficult to get better than this – and I genuinely think it could end up being one of the most exciting games of 2025.
We won’t have long to wait, anyway – Split Fiction releases on March 5. I can’t wait to try it out in full.