Co-Op-Only Split Fiction Is An Impressive Leap Forward From The Makers Of It Takes Two

Ahead of its reveal at The Game Awards, I got to play about an hour of Split Fiction alongside Hazelight Studios founder Josef Fares, jumping around the opening hours, a few side quests, and mid-story moments. Fares even showcased a part of the game that I'm forbidden from talking about save for telling people that I played it and I can mention how cool I may think it was. It's so f**king cool, y'all. Video games are really amazing with what they can accomplish sometimes.

Like the studio's previous games, A Way Out and It Takes Two, Split Fiction is a mandatory two-player co-op game. This time around, instead of playing as two escaped convicts or two divorcing parents, you're playing as two would-be writers: Mio and Zoe. Both sign up to participate in a new publishing program in which writers are virtually transported into the worlds they've created, simulating a story the publisher will then take and give to the rest of the world. Turns out the tech company that is publishing people's stories is less-than-moral and when Mio tries to leave against their wishes, she accidentally ends up in Zoe's story. The two discover that they then can cross between one another's stories, using that trait to escape their deadly fantasies before the publisher steals their memories.

Glitches allow Mio and Zoe to go back and forth between the former's sci-fi world and the latter's fantasy one.

The major gimmick of Split Fiction is that Mio is a sci-fi writer while Zoe loves high fantasy, so the mechanics between their stories are very different. Mio's sci-fi world sees her and Zoe don mech suits, control gravity, swing laser swords, and shoot plasma rifles, for example, while Zoe's fantasy world sees her and Mio raise dragons, gain druidic wildshaping abilities, and sling spells. Like the protagonists of It Takes Two, Mio and Zoe do not share abilities beyond baseline platforming mechanics, so each player will have to work together in order to make their way through each level.