William Hughes: The power of friendship can get you through damn near anything, argues new co-op adventure game Split Fiction—long-lingering traumas, corporate conspiracies, fantastical scenarios where you slash your way through robot armies as “cyber-ninjas,” or go soaring through the skies on a dragon’s back. But also, it argues (less explicitly, but undeniably), the power of cooperation can paper over a whole host of issues with Hazelight’s latest cooperative experience itself: The confusion of spectacle with excitement, occasionally frustrating boss fights, and—most damning, for a story ostensibly about the joys of writing—some of the most ham-fisted dialogue and storytelling to pop up in a game in recent memory.
And yet, I found it impossible not to like Split Fiction, which sends you and a friend (either online, or via couch co-op) through a two-player, 14-hour adventure, and is easily Hazelight’s best title to date: more exciting than prison break adventure A Way Out, less off-putting than “Roleplay with your friends or loved ones as a couple on the brink of divorce” sim It Takes Two. With its story of two young writers who find themselves trapped in a machine that brings their creations to life, the game is bright and quick-moving, and even, occasionally, brilliant. Those moments where it finds new ways to put closed-off hardass Mio (who favors sci-fi) and cheerful dreamer Zoe (fantasy) into conversation with each other through its play, rather than its dialogue, allow the game to do things I’d never seen titles like this do. Spoiling those highlights would be a crime for incoming players, but suffice it to say that many of them are rooted fundamentally in the game’s genuine love of authorship, with one player essentially “becoming” the story, while the other serves as its protagonist. When it isn’t just trying to be loud—as it unfortunately, frequently does, layering bombast and screams over simplistic gameplay as a cover for how little you’re actually doing in some of its busier segments—Split Fiction is genuinely clever, and even occasionally lovely. Those moments where it lives up to its potential, toying with shared and divided perspectives and minds, are the kinds that will linger in the memory for some time.
Unfortunately, very little of that grace translates to the game’s more overt storytelling. Mio and Zoe (played by Kaja Chan and Elsie Bennett, respectively) are pleasant enough characters to spend time with, but also loaded down with motivating traumas so obvious and shallow that you and your co-op partner will likely be calling them out in the game’s first hour, only to have them teased out for the rest of the experience. And the game’s top-level plot, a transparent metaphor for the rapacity of A.I. robber barons strip-mining human creativity to fill the universe with machine-generated dreck, would barely pass muster as the story of a Saturday morning cartoon. There’s insightful criticism to be done about the ways creatives like Mio and Zoe are induced to sell their own potential to the machine, or the tech-bro tendency to assume “creativity” is just another number that can be chucked into a spreadsheet. But Split Fiction ain’t it. Its main villain, especially, is a cartoon, not a character, a symptom of a game that never gives one of its fictional denizens two layers of depth when it could slide by with one, instead.
And yet, here, as everywhere in the game’s design, Split Fiction‘s co-op nature can save it. Hazelight’s great realization has been that it’s simply, undeniably more fun to play through a game with a friend by your side, whether you’re experiencing the highs—like some of the game’s Psychonauts-esque Side Stories, or the game’s final level, where it finally lets itself go completely off the rails and embrace its merged-worlds premise—or its lows, as you’re repeating a frustrating boss fight for the 10th time, or critiquing, say, how silly it is for its resident Musk-alike to build a machine that is both the world’s greatest VR simulator and a surprisingly great “face your inner demon” machine, only to use it to rip off the deliberately cliché story ideas of a bunch of unpublished authors. I was lucky, in this endeavor, to be able to play through the game with A.V. Club Features Editor Jen Lennon, and so, in the interest of embracing Split Fiction‘s co-op conceit, I thought I’d let her take the reins of this review for a minute. Jen, as the Zoe to my Mio, how did the game hit you?
Jen Lennon: I warned you about this before we started playing, William, but I’m terrible at platforming and co-op games (insert “I don’t play well with others” joke here). Anything that requires a modicum of patience, dexterity, or—god forbid—coordination with another person is not my strong suit, to put it kindly, so simply being able to get through the game was my biggest concern. I was worried that, at points, I’d have to have my partner (a much more precise gamer than I) tap in and help me out through timing- or distance-combat-based sections that I just couldn’t nail down. But, to my surprise—and I think this was at least 50-percent due to your patient guidance in telling me which buttons to press at which times and then reacting fast enough when I jumped ahead of my own countdowns meant to keep us in sync, William—I never once encountered a part where I thought, “There’s just no way I’m ever going to be able to do this.” Yet I never felt like it was too easy, either. Somehow, even with our different playstyles and levels of experience, Split Fiction always felt like it was just the right difficulty. The biggest challenge comes from how well you and your gaming buddy work together, which is a nice, if somewhat pat, metaphor for the game’s story.
We got through the game inside of Hazelight’s estimated 12- to 15-hour completion window without too much trouble, though I do think you, as the more experienced game reviewer and critic, were better able to analyze Split Fiction’s mechanics while I was more focused on just reacting to whatever it threw our way. And, as you mentioned, it threw a lot at us: The game never gave its constantly shifting mechanics room to breathe, and it barely let a moment pass without some cringey dialogue being shoved in between intrusive sound effects.
The relentless barrage of stuff felt like an attempt to distract from its subpar storytelling, and it might’ve worked in a game that is less explicitly about the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we tell others, and the different ways in which we tell those stories depending on who is listening. But most of the time, the gameplay simply wasn’t innovative enough to overcome the narrative shortcomings. So much of what is interesting about fictional stories comes from contrast: What is said versus what’s left unsaid. The space, both physical and metaphorical, between one word and the next. There is obvious contrast between Split Fiction’s physical sci-fi and fantasy worlds, but the game doesn’t trust its players enough to let them draw their own conclusions about what it’s trying to say with its narrative structure, so it overcompensates by eliminating any metaphorical space and filling it with another slide or wall-run.
Like you, though, I did find the final level immensely fun, and my favorite moments throughout the game were the ones where it let us work together in genuinely interesting ways. I almost wish Hazelight had tried a little less hard with the story and just leaned into the pure joy of the experience a bit more. Not everything needs a serious emotional narrative; sometimes, art can just be fun. And Split Fiction is a lot of fun, despite all its faults.
WH: The thing about Hazelight’s games is that, even when I’m critiquing their flaws, I can’t help but wish there were more games out there like them. (Including the company’s embrace of its incredibly generous Friends Pass system, which allows purchasers to invite friends to play the game along with them without shelling out for a second copy.) Even when the meat-and-potatoes moments of Split Fiction weren’t inspiring me—running through its levels, using slightly different powersets to navigate platforms, timing-based challenges, and inevitable bits of wall-running and grapple-hooking—or I was disappointed by its failures to capitalize on the wild potential of its premise, I was still having a genuinely good time communicating, planning, or sometimes just joking around with my partner. (In some ways, the primacy it puts on the experience of working with another player is a far more compelling anti-A.I. stance than anything that happens in its writing; this is an experience you simply couldn’t replicate with a machine.) The game moves quickly, looks beautiful, and (in our experience of playing it in online split-screen on PS5 between Portland and Los Angeles) ran with zero technical issues. The fact that there’s genuinely very little out there like it doesn’t obviate the fact that I desperately wish Hazelight would hire some writers with more nuanced or thoughtful ideas, or trim out some of the game’s more rote elements. But it does matter: For co-op enthusiasts, we’re lucky that the only game in town is this polished and fun, even if it’s not quite the narrative masterpiece its own characters might endeavor to create.
