Split Fiction Review — The Best Co-op Game Yet

Cooperative games have always played an integral part in my gaming experience. Growing up with a twin brother, my parents almost exclusively purchased co-op games, or at least multiplayer games, that allowed special memories to be made, ones that would last a lifetime. That’s why Hazelight Studios’ library of games is so important to the current landscape of video games, where your classic couch coop games are scarce. Split Fiction follows on from the triumphant success of Game of the Year winner It Takes Two, and in my opinion, Hazelight’s latest may just be one of the best coop games ever made.

The game follows two writers, Mio, a sci-fi writer and Zoe, a fantasy writer, who are invited to Rader Publishing to test out a machine called The Machine, which emulates simulations of a writer’s story, or so they think. It’s actually a machine that steals creative ideas from the minds of writers, and after our protagonists unknowingly agree to be hooked up to The Machine, Mio gets cold feet and, after a struggle, ends up in the same pod as Zoe.

This then causes chaos to unfold as they both become imprisoned inside Mio’s sci-fi-themed stories and Zoe’s fantasy-themed stories through an emulation. Working together, they must clear through these worlds and find glitches to destroy the machine, keeping them from the real world.

The core concept of the narrative behind Split Fiction is exciting and allowed Hazelight Studios to explore gameplay mechanics and landscapes a lot more thoroughly than the world we explored in It Takes Two. The only qualm I had about the game is that it took over half the game for me to develop a liking for Mio and Zoe. Mio, at least at the beginning of the game, was abrasive, which made her quite unlikable. It is after we spend 7-10 hours with the ladies that we get to see some emotional vulnerability in each of them, and a connection between myself and the characters finally formed. And while the characters didn’t really hit the mark for me, the gameplay is more than strong enough to shoulder that burden.

The gameplay is very similar to It Takes Two, following that award-winning formula where both characters will obtain two different abilities in each world. The abilities are really extremely fun and allow for some creative puzzles that have next to no boundaries. I won’t give away too many of the abilities, but my character, Zoe, could swap between turning into a fairy and a tree-like Groot character at the click of a button, while Mio could turn into a giant monkey and an axolotl-type creature that can swim.

Each world followed a rhythm of events where you would get your new abilities and use them to solve puzzles and interact with the world individually before becoming more challenging and requiring a decent amount of coordination with your partner. It feels very maximalist in the way Hazelight explore these abilities; almost everything that you think could be possible is, in fact, possible.

Split Fiction constantly draws inspiration from your favourite genres of games, often changing the perspective from the standard third-person to something completely different. You often see nods to classics like Donkey Kong Country and Metroid, plus more modern games like Elden Ring and It Takes Two (of course). I do feel like they definitely could achieve a lot more technically with current-gen hardware. The last chapter of the game, in particular, achieves a mindblowing and completely bonkers experience that I thought, in theory, would not be possible in a video game, or at least on consoles. While I think sticking to sci-fi and fantasy worlds did provide some limitations to the diversity of the worlds you explore, it rarely dampened the experience for me.

There are side stories you can enjoy, which break apart from the main world and transport you to a world that feels a lot more experimental with farfetched concepts and ideas. You may have seen one of them in the launch trailer for this game, where you play as two pigs, and one can fart to boost themselves to higher places, and the other can be a spring piggy. These side stories were an absolute joy and probably my favourite part of the game. I wish there were more. They kind of just disappear from the game at a certain point in the narrative, and you could certainly feel the absence of them towards the end of the game, but I can understand why they didn’t fit within those last few chapters.

I played Split Fiction with a mate, and we played the first half with couch co-op before finishing off the game online. While I noticed a tiny bit of lag when we were playing online, it wasn’t too drastic. At worst, it was just the second player rubber-banding for half a second, but that was rare. Online play performs just as well as local play, which bodes well for the friend pass functionality, which allows a player to join you without needing to purchase their own copy of the game.

Hazelight Studios are in their own lane at this moment in time. There is no one creating co-op games that are as polished and potent in their own charm like Split Fiction and It Takes Two are. This game will no doubtedly be in contention for Game of the Year when those discussions take place later in the year, and I can’t wait to see what the next Hazelight game will do to revolutionise their successful formula.