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.
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.
Split Fiction also has a much more positive vibe than It Takes Two, leaning into buddy-cop movie tropes. Mio is into sci-fi and thinks fantasy is silly. Zoe is into fantasy and thinks sci-fi is loud and terrible. Mio is from the city. Zoe is from the countryside. You get the point–they’re opposites. Over the preview, I got to see multiple points in the story, going from their argumentative meeting, to their awkward first few moments of trying to work together, to seeing their constant bickering evolve into friendly ribbing. What I played through seemed sweet, and I was regularly laughing and having a good time–I’m eager to see the whole adventure play out at the pace it’s meant to instead of squeezed into one hour.
During the preview, Fares showed me a few of the side stories. These optional offshoots are one-and-done quests featuring unique mechanics that are never used again in any part of the game. They feature stories from Zoe and Mio’s pasts that they worked on as kids or teens or started in adulthood but never finished. My favorite of Zoe’s side stories I played saw the duo race against one another down a mountain on snowboards, while my favorite of Zoe’s was a 2D adventure across a page of lined notebook paper in which Zoe (as a child) was frequently crossing out and scribbling new words that kept changing what weapons Mio and Zoe had or what type of enemies they were fighting. There are a ton of these–as The Game Awards trailer showcases, there are dozens of different sci-fi and high-fantasy stories in this one game, each with their own gameplay loops. Some are serious. Others look very silly. A few seem to have the capacity to be deeply emotionally rewarding.
More than anything, though, I came away from my time with Split Fiction deeply impressed. The power of current-gen consoles is on full display, as moving between the sci-fi and fantasy worlds feels instantaneous. Again, I cannot talk about everything I saw during the demo, but the secret I got to play through was, frankly, incredible. Unless I happened to see the one and only impressive hour of an otherwise deeply subpar game (which feels unlikely but it’s important to note how previews aren’t always an accurate view of the whole experience), Split Fiction is absolutely going to be something to keep an eye out for. Folks are in for a treat with this one.
Split Fiction is set to launch for Xbox Series X|S, PS5, and PC on March 6, 2025.