Hazelight Studios has an incredibly specific shtick. While other studios are making single-player campaigns or multiplayer games that incentivize you to play forever, Hazelight has carved out a niche in the middle, splitting the difference by making multiplayer games that take players through linear campaigns that you can play with a friend, then move on.
With A Way Out, It Takes Two, and now Split Fiction, the developer has served up story-focused games that nevertheless require you have a co-op partner by your side. Even Brothers has this idea, though that was a single player game with each character controlled by a separate thumbstick.
Metaphorically speaking, of course. These games have online multiplayer, so ‘by your side’ can actually mean across the world.
Multiplayer Is Required, And That’s Part Of The Fun
Despite the success Hazelight has had with this formula, there aren’t a ton of games trying something similar. Chained Together — which tasked two to four players, connected by a chain, with working together to escape hell — got some attention last year.
But that game was purely focused on multiplayer shenanigans, with no real story to speak of. There are plenty of co-op games in this narrative-lite vein. Overcooked, Moving Out, Snipperclips, and Heave Ho ask you to work together to accomplish a task, but don’t tie that task into any larger narrative, beyond a perfunctory set-up.
On the other end of the spectrum, co-op is a fixture of series like Halo, Far Cry, and Dying Light. But those games don’t require co-op and so aren’t built around it. You can play through their campaigns alone or with friends, and that flexibility is nice, but it prevents the kind of inventive level and puzzle design that It Takes Two was able to achieve.
The beauty of It Takes Two is that it could include ideas that just wouldn’t work in any other context, like the level that gave one player a nail and the other a hammer and forced them to use the tools in concert.
Hazelight Has A Great (But Mostly Empty) Niche
In an industry that is desperate to find some reliable path to success, Hazelight has found one that works. And it did that by, counterintuitively, making games that are designed to be finished, not played forever. That sets it apart from the prevailing multiplayer trends and a lot of its success is due to the fact that no one else is really making games like this.
Hazelight might struggle if everyone started making similar games to compete, but there’s definitely room for a few more developers making narrative co-op games. Hazelight puts out a game every three or four years which means that most of the time, no one is filling this niche.
Weirdly, all three games have also launched in March. Maybe that’s the secret.
That wait means that I can’t wait to get my hands on Split Fiction. If you’ve clicked with one of Hazelight’s games in the past, there’s a good chance you feel the same. I reviewed It Takes Two back in 2021 and playing through that campaign with my wife was a ton of fun. None of the game’s surprises were out in the world yet so we got to discover them all on our own, for good (the wildly inventive levels and fantastic boss fights) and for bad (the elephant scene). Split Fiction seems to be maintaining It Takes Two’s spirit of constant reinvention and its dark sense of humor, and I fully expect the game to be similarly full of surprises.
That’s the joy of a game like this that is co-op and story-focused. You can experience the fun of playing with another person, all while getting the same thrills you get from a single-player campaign. It’s like going on a roller coaster with your best friend strapped in beside you.
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