In the dozen or so hours a friend and I put into Split Fiction, the latest co-op game from It Takes Two developer Hazelight, it never seemed to run out of ideas. This latest release, with its marriage of fantasy and science fiction, still feels as fresh and inventive as It Takes Two and A Way Out did for their time, which is all the more impressive considering that the studio has been releasing these co-op adventures now for the better part of a decade.
Split Fiction follows two aspiring writers: Mio, a broody science fiction author, and Zoe, a bubbly fantasy lover. The two could not be more diametrically opposed, but they only have to suffer each other’s presence for a day as they meet at the offices of Rader Publishing, each hoping to secure a deal for her books. However, when the corporation asks that they enter a virtual simulation of their own stories, Mio is rightfully suspicious and tries to fight her way out, before she is accidentally forced into Zoe’s simulation and the entire system goes haywire. Now, with both writers’ stories intertwined, Mio and Zoe must break out of the simulation by finding glitches scattered throughout, all while trying to survive in hostile fictional environments of their own creation.
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On its face, Split Fiction’s swapping back and forth between science fiction levels and vast fantasy worlds is novel, but not groundbreaking. Most of the stories Mio and Zoe hop between are pretty generic and derivative, blatantly drawing on everything from Mega Man to your favorite dragon fantasy book, so clearly Split Fiction isn’t trying to be the video-game equivalent of the next great American novel. It’s riffing on existing aesthetics and archetypes, using them as a stage to build out its mechanics. The part of the premise that hits much harder is how pertinent it feels in the age of corporate-driven AI slop.
Mio, Zoe, and all the other authors who show up at Rader’s office come bright-eyed and bushy-tailed looking for a publishing deal, and instead are trapped in a simulation meant to extract their ideas for the company’s own use. Right now, AI machine learning algorithms are being trained to steal from creatives and present the garbage they churn out as original works, while the people poised to profit from them use notions of leveling the creative playing field to justify the plagiarism these tools depend on. Even if director Josef Fares seems hesitant to call it the core theme of the game, choosing instead to focus on the friendship between the two women in interviews, I’d say the most compelling thing about Split Fiction is the cathartic act of artistic reclamation.
The game spends plenty of time delving into why Mio writes violent sci-fi and Zoe delves into escapist fantasy, and fighting through their stories means confronting all the internal baggage that those worlds have tied to them in their writers’ imaginations. So often we talk about how AI technology steals from artists, writers, and actors as a crime against their livelihoods. While that’s an important part of it, what I loved most about Split Fiction was that it illustrates how generative slop also robs the work of its human meaning. Yeah, Rader’s machines can probably generate an amorphous science fiction story faster and cheaper than the one Mio writes, but if it’s not fueled by her past and all the trauma she’s gone through, it’s just capital C Content to be bought and consumed. And yeah, the stories my co-op partner and I played through aren’t going to be winning any literary awards, but they were made by a person with hopes, dreams, and things to say. Fighting our way through those stories to save them from being devoured by some rich asshole’s machine gives them meaning, even if they’re not that interesting on their own.
Using Mio and Zoe’s stories as a basis, Split Fiction riffs on similar design ideas as It Takes Two. Each level shifts between genres and also has a core cooperative loop that requires you and your co-op partner to coordinate. As the game shifts between fantasy and sci-fi, every level leans into a different subgenre and that means even any two sci-fi levels will play entirely differently. Split Fiction is bursting at the seams with fun and challenging ideas that blend video game genres as much as literary ones. I know plenty of people played It Takes Two with partners who were less familiar with video games and generally managed fine; Split Fiction takes on so many different gaming genres that it may at first seem tougher to handle for those less versed in games, but its design goes to great lengths to keep things approachable, even for those who have never played the kinds of games it’s referencing.
There are levels based on rhythm games and old-school run-and-guns like Metal Slug, as well as sequences involving high-speed bike chases, puzzle-solving on dragonback, and even some out-of-pocket side stories I won’t spoil here. What ties it all together is a clear attention to intuitive design that makes it easy to transition from one tightly crafted space to another and pick up on new mechanics unlike anything you’ve played up to that point. The game seamlessly escalates between teaching you a new mechanic and then communicating new ways it can be used within a level, and the way it throws new tools and problems your way is consistently surprising. Communication between both players is an important part of Split Fiction, but because there’s such clarity to how levels are designed, there were long stretches in which my partner and I could get through tricky cooperative maneuvers without even speaking.
So many standout moments in Split Fiction had me and my partner hootin’ and hollerin’ as we took on whatever Hazelight threw at us. The game’s willingness to get silly, both in between the edgy sci-fi stories and fantasy epics and sometimes in the midst of them, was a constant pleasant surprise. I was already enjoying Split Fiction, but the moment it clicked with me was in one of Mio’s science fiction stories in which I was driving a motorcycle through a cyberpunk city while my partner, on the back of the bike, was attempting to disengage its self-destruct order on a smartphone, a process which included realistic captcha puzzles and various other annoying things our phones ask us to do on the way to being useful. It was in that segment that I knew Split Fiction would keep us on our toes and we would never know what to expect.
Several of these surprising and silly segments happen during side stories, which are optional vignettes from the subconscious of the writers dating back as far as their early memories of writing childish nonsense in elementary school. They might see a dentist appointment turned into a straight-up horror story, or make a whole puzzle-platformer out of pigs launching themselves with rainbow-powered farts. Split Fiction could have stuck to its sci-fi and fantasy levels and still been an excellent game, but I loved the way it illustrated that storytelling doesn’t just start when you’re putting pen to paper intending to be published. A creative person is often imagining stories from a young age, and if a machine is going to rip those stories out of someone’s mind, why would it only pull from the ones they intended to put into a book?
The one part of the game that I won’t spoil but have to sing the praises of is the final level. Throughout Split Fiction, I was curious how the game would spotlight both its heroes and their stories equally in its finale, and the way Hazelight goes about wrapping up the game is, without exaggeration, one of the most impressive video game sequences I’ve ever played. The studio was straight up just showing off at this point, and I’m kinda mad I’ll never experience it for the first time again. That’s the kind of feeling you can’t scrap from a creative person’s brain and sell as slop. Split Fiction is a culmination of the design ideas the studio has been working with since A Way Out, and it kinda feels like Hazelight threw everything it had at a wall, and it all stuck. It’s a tribute to several video games and to genre fiction, but also to the creative process itself. Fares may think people and AI should co-exist in creative fields, but when you’re already making games this inventive, do they have to? I don’t think so.
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