Is there a developer better placed than Hazelight Studios to push our perception of what co-operative gaming is capable of? Following on from their retrospectively experimental prison breaker A Way Out the team based in Stockholm came into their own with It Takes Two, an emotive tale of clashing couple Cody and May who are forced to work through their marital differences whilst on a quest to reunite with their daughter following a magical transformation to miniature dolls.
This strictly co-operative adventure succeeds in its variety of fantastical environments, each laced with quirky characters and casual puzzles requiring co-ordination and teamwork to solve. Most of all though, the emotional, sometimes hostile, connection between the two controllable characters is shared by you and your gaming companion, whoever they may be; almost immediately, the experience demands communication and patience between you both. Any obstructions you share whilst working together must be ironed out, same as Cody and May in game.
It Takes Two reinvigorated couch co-op and won a host of awards including game of the year at The Game Awards 2021. Hazelight Studios’ upcoming co-operative follow up Split Fiction appears to be taking all the variety afforded by It Takes Two whilst ramping it up into something possibly more remarkable. Will it topple It Takes Two from its pedestal? If it can, it’ll surely be a shoo-in for more game of the year awards for the Swedish team. Take a look at Split Fiction’s gameplay trailers and it’s hard not to be enraptured by the possibility. Hazelight Studios are raising the bar once again.
Variety is the spice of life and Split Fiction provides it by the bucketload, with the premise here affording Hazelight Studios vast opportunity to usurp multiple genres and gameplay styles; you and your partner will work together in command of realist sci-fi writer Mio and fantasy novelist Zoe who’re sucked into a simulation of their own stories, radically contrasting worlds jumping between sci-fi and fantasy from which they’ll overcome varied and expected challenges to forge their escape before the nefarious Radar Publishing corporation steal their most creative ideas for their own. Each of the game’s levels showcase unique mechanics and abilities distinct to Mio and Zoe, and you – the players – will need to combine their skills to solve an array of environmental puzzles and to take down numerous end-level bosses.
If you’ve played Astro Bot, you’ll be familiar with a 3D platformer which demonstrates a host of unique ideas into one cohesive whole, and whilst it isn’t clear just yet if Split Fiction will match Team Asobi’s monumental effort for ideas, it looks like it’ll at least come close. And much like Astro Bot, there’s a Nintendo-style aesthetic running through Split Fiction’s whimsy of ideas: death-defying escapes from suns turning supernova, scraps with irritated cats, mountain climbs with giants, surfing the deserts on the back of sandfishes, exploring shipwrecked space stations, water-skiing atop translucent oceans in pursuit of hovertrains; lasers, dragons, even stints transformed into pigs who – rather grimly – learn where sausages come from.
The craziest of Split Fiction’s activities come in the form of side stories; optional side content that, as implored by Hazelight Studios founder Josef Fares, you will not want to miss. These one-off adventures are hidden within the game’s main campaign levels, and they promise to shake up the mechanics even more so than the main campaign’s levels. Narratively, side stories encompass Split Fiction’s wildest ideas because they are representations of stories both Mio and Zoe wrote when they were younger. Aspiring, juvenile writers without the constraints of book deals and style guides, free to jot down whatever daft thought springs to mind. Such is the imagination of the young, free-spirited mind that Split Fictions’ side stories end up as the weirdest, most wonderful, and chaotic situations in the entire game.
Side stories underpin a central theme in Split Fiction, and it’s one that was explored overtly in It Takes Two, and that is the meaning of companionship; the necessity for friends, love, of being kind to oneself, of living a wholesome life. Not only are these side stories composed of thoughts and ideas from both our authors’ younger years, but they contain long forgotten secrets nestled deep within their fiction too. Side stories, and indeed the game’s main storyline, will peel back the layers of our novelists’ hardened shells, the deep-rooted personification of themselves which they keep hidden away from each other and the world at large.
It’s stated that at Split Fiction’s outset our two central characters don’t see eye to eye, but throughout their journey they’ll learn to trust each other through sharing these repressed, and possibly traumatic, personal struggles and experiences. Hazelight Studios haven’t shared whether these back-stories are sad in nature, but it seems likely given both Mio and Zoe grow to share a true bond throughout the game. They’ll heal together, perhaps, going way beyond the pragmatic relationship required to escape the shifting reality they find themselves in.
Worry not if you think Split Fiction is going to be too emotionally heavy a rollercoaster. That prior paragraph was speculation, albeit based on the game’s description as per Hazelight Studios’ website and media fact sheet, but speculation all the same. Above all else, most importantly the game looks super fun. A core tenet of Hazelight Studios’ philosophy is for good times to be shared. As an example of this the team in Stockholm regularly host internal game jams, a platform to develop their whackiest ideas together perhaps (some of these ideas, for the record, have made it into Split Fiction’s final version, so you’ll get to play through these crazy, communally developed ideas for yourself). Furthermore, for players of Hazelight Studios’ games, it means experiencing together on the couch via split screen, or online with someone who might not even live in the same country.
To that end, a staple feature of theirs in A Way Out and It Takes Two – The Friends Pass – will return for Split Fiction, enabling one player who owns the game to invite a friend to play online with them for free, whether they own the game themselves or not. Furthermore, Hazelight Studios have plans to introduce crossplay giving friends across PlayStation, Xbox, and PC opportunity to play together should they so wish. It doesn’t appear as though crossplay will be available at launch though given the wording in an article published on Hazelight Studios’ website.
Split Fiction will launch March 6th to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via Steam, and if the title of this feature seemed a little hyperbolic perhaps now we’re at the end of the feature you might be someway convinced there’s another game of the year award in the waiting. There’ll be stiff competition from numerous other games including, perhaps, Monster Hunter Wilds, Grand Theft Auto VI (of course), plus Nintendo Switch 2’s barrage of expected titles such as Metroid Prime 4: Beyond and a new 3D Mario, but for a game which will marry imagination, fun, and emotion with sheer gameplay variety – plus two disparate genres in sci-fi and fantasy – then it’s tough to see how Split Fiction will be overtaken come awards season.
Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.
