Specifically, the co-op game has reportedly been set up at Story Kitchen, the media group that previously shepherded Hazelight’s last title, massively successful “troubled couple works through their problems with a magic book” game It Takes Two, into a spot as a film project at Amazon. Reports, citing sources at this week’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, go so far as to suggest that this new project, which will take its story from the one written for the game by Josef Fares and Sebastian Johansson, is already the subject of a “bidding war.”
Split Fiction puts its focus on two characters, each controlled by one of the game’s two players: One, Mio, is a guarded science fiction writer with a nihilistic bent; the other, Zoe, is a chipper fantasy lover with an endless optimistic streak. The two get shoved into each others’ head spaces quite literally in the game’s opening moments, when a machine they’re plugged into by an unscrupulous tech company (meant to recreate writers’ invented worlds in virtual reality) glitches out, forcing their two mental universes to collide. The result is a bright, colorful, and occasionally inventive cooperative adventure that makes the most out of putting you and a friend into the shoes of these charming, if stock, characters.
(We’ll be brutally honest here and cop to some skepticism about these film plans, in so far as the things that are really good about Split Fiction have little to do with either its premise or its writing, and everything with how it navigates the co-op experience. Stripping out the play side, and just leaving the story, feels a bit like cracking an egg and then trying to cook with the shell. But we digress.)
News of the planned film comes as Hollywood continues to get more comfortable embracing video gaming as a source of IP. Although nothing has yet managed to match the huge box office success of 2023’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie, it hasn’t stopped studios from trying to chase that particular high.
