Let’s face it. I died a lot in Split Fiction when I played it with a partner at a preview event held by Hazelight and Electronic Arts. But I got right back up and went back into the fray. And I really enjoyed my time with the split-screen co-op action adventure game.
Split Fiction, is coming out on the consoles and PC on March 6, 2025, for $50. But I got to try it out for a few hours and I also interviewed Josef Fares, founder of the award-winning Hazelight studio, after playing the game.
Sitting on the couch with my partner, the game started with the humor of a couple of book authors who immediately didn’t hit it off. You play as Mio and Zoe — two authors, one sci-fi, one fantasy. They’re like oil and vinegar when it comes to personalities. But they’re thrown together into a common catastrophe. Only by working together — with one player helping the other — can they get out of it.
The two visit a simulation tech company where they are promised a publishing deal. The writers become trapped in their own stories after being hooked up to a machine designed by an evil book “simulation” publisher who wants to steal their creative ideas.
To escape with their minds intact, they have to overcome their differences to crash the system that holds them. The hard part is learning to work together, Fares said in an interview with GamesBeat. Mio is not particularly friendly, but she has an accurate, skeptical instinct toward the company’s intentions. Zoe is a lot more trusting and is willing to accept any indignity to get published.
She happily steps onto a platform as the machine activates a bubble that puts her into a kind of sleep stasis — and begins extracting the stories from her head. But Mio resists and wants to leave. The evil CEO won’t let her, struggles with her and she falls into Zoe’s bubble. They fall into the same fantasy world, with Mio appearing inside Zoe’s story world through a glitch. They start trying to find their way out by following the glitch, which alternately takes them into different fantasy or sci-fi worlds.
The gameplay starts out fairly easy, but in each encounter/puzzle/fight, it took us a couple of tries to get the timing right on fighting and movement. It wasn’t super difficult in that we never got stuck for a long time. But sometimes one player had to carry the other through a given fight scene.
It was early to learn to play fast. I saw that much of the interactivity was color coded. If there was a purple lettering, that was meant for Mio and so I had to hit my right bumper on my controller to use my grappling hook to fly through a space quickly. If it was green, it was meant for the other player, Fares in this case, to use his controller to get Zoe to do something. You could run on the walls like in Titanfall, and you could jump on a rail and slide like in It Takes Two.
A couple of hours in, there were some tougher fights where it took us a long time to get through the battles. We liked how the difficulty ratcheted up gradually through the game. The humor of the pig side quest was gross in a charming way — Mio flies around with atomic-powered farts, while Zoe climbs by . I always liked how every battle involved Mio doing one thing and Zoe doing another — and victory only coming through cooperation in fighting the enemies.
As you might know, split-screen games are very hard to day. It’s like using one game console to display two different games at once on the same screen. That pushes the computing resources to the limit, and the developer has to ratchet down the quality of the graphics to keep the dual frame rates up. Fortunately, with the animated style of the game, the quality looks pretty good, as it is built on Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5.
Hazelight also has a lot of veterans working on the game. Fares started with Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, a moving tale of two brothers. Hazelight followed that up A Way Out (about two prisoners in a jailbreak) in 2018. In 2021, Hazelight won Game of the Year for the split-screen game It Takes Two, about a couple on the verge of divorce. I’ve played each game, but have yet to get to the end of It Takes Two. Along the way, Hazelight kept working with EA Originals, and they have the formula down and a rare ability to tell a story that is both moving, funny and full of gameplay originality.
Split Fiction’s has an array of ever-changing mechanics that keeps both players on the edge of the couch. Both Mio and Zoe have to recognize the scenes from their stories that the simulation is visualizing as virtual worlds. And they have to work their way through the lush fantasy spaces and sci-fi skylines.
You have to do things like transform yourself with a button push into a fish to swim through a fantasy stream. Zoe has to use a magnetic arm to fetch boxes and throw them at attacking flying police cars. Mio has to go into close combat with soldiers and hack away with a cybernetic sword. They have to ride on hoverboards through desert sands and surf around sand sharks from something like Dune. I’m aware there will be more surprises in the gameplay but I’m not going to spoil them.
Part of the narrative appeal of the game is that Mio and Zoe don’t get along at first, but they learn they are each other’s only hope. The characters will change in some way along their journey. And they have to learn more about each other as they go along — and defeat problems together.
I asked Fares if you would ever be able to play as a human player, paired with an AI character. Fares said that would just be a normal single-player game that wouldn’t be as fun, as your AI partner can’t really behave like a real human.
“If it’s isn’t broke, don’t fix it,” he said.
Is this game going to be worth $50? For sure. It’s a 15-hour game that so far is very entertaining. And it’s another title that could win the ever-creative Hazelight a lot of awards.
Disclosure: EA paid my way to the event for the purpose of this preview.
