What's better than playing a game as a cyberpunk ninja, shapeshifting ape, flying dragon and hopping hot dog? Playing it with a friend on the couch next to you -- and relying on each other to move from one wacky, earnest adventure to another.
In a warehouse in Hollywood, California, I sat down next to a stranger and played a few hours of EA's Hazelight Studios' next game, Split Fiction. By the end of our session, which capped off with a particularly grueling pinball boss, we high-fived and shook hands. Bonded through narrow escapes and clutch wins, we were no longer strangers.
Collaboration has been the appeal of Hazelight's prior games, its 2018 debut A Way Out and its award-winning 2021 follow-up It Takes Two. But whereas those games centered on well-established relationships -- between outlaw brothers and a married couple on the brink of divorce, respectively -- Split Fiction imitates my journey: Two strangers, Zoe and Mio, are shoved together and must rely on each other to escape a series of progressively outlandish challenges.
In one segment, players either fly on their dragon (left) or roll and ride (right) -- Zoe and Mio always have different yet complementary mechanics.
Hazelight StudiosHazelight has built a reputation for inventive mechanics in its cooperative sections and moving stories. The former make up a lot of the trailer showcases and memorable gameplay moments from past games. From my few hours playing, I can tell that Split Fiction will have a lot of those, too. The studio spends tons of time developing one-off experiences that feel cinematic, Hazelight founder and Split Fiction director Joseph Fares told me.
"We have scenes [in Split Fiction] with dragons that goes on for ten minutes where they have big dragons because [the players] evolve the dragons -- and just one dragon took, like, 18 months to create," Fares said, emphasizing that Hazelight doesn't want these moments to overstay their welcome. "If you look at a great movie, you have a great scene, you don't repeat that scene, because it takes the edge out of it."
While these sequences are flashy, the overarching story is just as important. Each game Fares and his teams have made has a different thematic focus regarding the relationship between the two player characters, even going back to the pre-Hazelight game Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons.
"Every [one of our] games has a word to it: Brothers is 'sorrow,' A Way Out is 'trust,' It Takes Two is 'collaboration,' and this one's about friendships," Fares said, describing Split Fiction as a "buddy movie" featuring two entirely different strangers who grow closer as you play. "We're going to go deep into their trauma, their back stories and learn more about them."
Split Fiction's mechanics: The core of a Hazelight game
My preview kicked off at the start of Split Fiction, when Mio and Zoe show up to the same call for writers to come see their creative stories visualized by a corporation, Rader Publishing, and its cutting-edge virtual reality pod technology. But when Mio gets unnerved by the company's exploitative vibes, she stumbles into Zoe's pod -- and players are off to the races, playing through stages made of each character's genre stories. Naturally, this leads to learning the inspiration behind Mio's exciting science fiction yarns and Zoe's cozy fantasy stories.
Hazelight uses this premise to put players in a roulette of scenarios, and what I saw ran a wide gamut of co-op platforming mainstays, from jumping between cybercars to shapeshifting through fantastical lakes and valleys to hopping around a grill as a hot dog (the sillier vignettes are optional side stories).
With several co-op games under Hazelight's belt, Fares prided his developers not just on how much they've developed their technical tools but also in refining the variety of mechanics (that is, the unique abilities given to players in each stage) to be fun but not overstay their welcome -- which are arguably the studio's signature elements.
"That is [the] tricky part with a Hazelight game: finding these mechanics that kind of feed each other and help each other and complement each other in a great way," Fares said.
Shapeshifting is one of many mechanics in Split Fiction.
Hazelight StudiosHazelight has gotten better at the technical side of things too, Fares said, even if players don't see it. "I think that people forget about our games is that we have to render two screens at the same time," he noted. Still, he assured that the game will maintain 60 frames per second on consoles, even with the more complex sequences Hazelight dreamed up.
As another journalist at the preview pointed out to me, Split Fiction changes these challenges as you play. In the first few chapters, Zoe and Mio separately progress through their own slices of levels, but in the later game they're actively using these mechanics to aid and rely on each other -- for example, in the fantasy shape-changing section, I used my ape form to slam different panels that blew air currents for my partner (in fairy form) to fly through.
These collaborative sections required a lot of timing and coordination, and in our chat, Fares admitted that balancing mechanics for different skill levels of players is "kind of like the hardest part."
Reader, I believed it: The aforementioned pinball boss, in which my partner clung to walls like Samus' morph ball while I bounced them around with giant flippers, was one of my hardest gaming challenges in recent memory. I white-knuckled through to the end after many deaths due to missed timing on my or my partner's part. While we sealed our successful partnership with a high-five at the end of our session, I could imagine lots of partner pairs straining to finish these challenging chapters -- which hopefully won't fray their out-of-game friendships in ways that other tough co-op games like Overcooked tend to do.
Split Fiction is, unsurprisingly, a game about stories
For creators, there's always a hidden temptation to make stories about creation, which results in a range of self-reflective commentaries from novel to navelgazing. Thankfully, Split Fiction seems more interested in using creativity as a lens for exploring the relationship between Zoe and Mio.
From the outset, the game's heroines voice traditional critiques of each other's favorite genres: Mio doesn't understand the cozy fantasy Zoe writes in, while Zoe dismisses Mio's action-packed science fiction. Given my preview jumped liberally between slices of the game, I didn't see much development in these attitudes, though I'd expect they'll get closer as they share more about each other as creators: "It's not only about the stories they write, it's why they write them so we will understand that their stories are related to what they have experienced in their life," Fares said.
And there's some real-world topical commentary about creation, too -- specifically about AI. Early in the game, it's revealed that Rader Publishing lured Zoe, Mio and the other writers to use their immersive pod technology in order to steal all their stories.
"It is a little bit of a reference to AI -- I mean, it's a big company stealing ideas, it's something we talked about when we were writing this," Fares said, adding that Hazelight began working on and writing Split Fiction three years ago. "I think most people who play it can sense it."
But Fares assured me that the game's main focus is on the growing friendship between Zoe and Mio. In an industry filled with narratives about seeking revenge or slaying gods, it's a relief that Hazelight's games put the spotlight on people and how they change -- often, how they become better versions of themselves through overcoming adversity together.
With the dearth of local co-op games, Hazelight's oeuvre stands out -- which Fares credits to the passion in the studio's developers.
"Look, we've always had success in our games. I truly believe that when you create something out of passion, people will feel it -- they will sense the passion, they will play it, and they will love it," Fares said.
Players will get their chance on March 6 when Split Fiction gets released, but it's coming with inherited goodwill as the game's predecessor It Takes Two won Game of the Year at the 2021 Game Awards. I'll admit I was surprised that a co-op game won such high honors, but Fares is confident in Split Fiction's chances next year: "Why not? I don't see why it can't win again."
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