I’ve started playing Split Fiction, and it’s just as good as everyone has been saying. Sure, the writing is a bit contrived, but this is a Hazelight game. What did you expect? We’re coming here looking for great co-op gameplay, not a compelling story that is anything more than a pastiche of what’s come before.
Before I’d had any of my suspicions confirmed, as I was preparing for a world of creative puzzles and even more creative solutions, I came across a stumbling block. I couldn’t work out how to get Friend’s Pass to work.
What Is Split Fiction’s Friend’s Pass?
Friend’s Pass is simultaneously Split Fiction’s most creative idea and its own worst enemy. One player – that’s me – has bought the game. Their friend – that’s my friend – wants to join them. However, it’s about a half-hour drive to each other’s houses, and we’ve got stuff going on. We want to play remotely, using the online services that many games implement.
Friend’s Pass is an EA initiative that allows a player who has bought the game to share it with someone who hasn’t. It basically acts as couch co-op would in the days of yore. My friend can join my game of Split Fiction remotely, as if they were sitting on the couch next to me.
Personally, this is fantastic. My brother and I arranged weekly meetings to work our way through It Takes Two, and we had a great time with it. Except for the part where we dismembered a cuddly elephant. We turned the game off and played a few calming games of FIFA after that traumatising experience.
My brother’s moved a little further away now, so I called up my oldest friend to replace him. This is the friend who introduced me to console gaming when I’d only ever been allowed a handheld at home. We had countless sleepovers as kids, passing the pad on Spider-Man, working our way through an incredibly mid but exciting-for-a-nine-year-old Eragon game, and fighting each other in Godzilla. I’m not sure if it was Destroy All Monsters or Save the Earth, but it was great fun.
In Eragon’s co-op story mode, I would often disconnect my controller at difficult platforming sections and plug it back in when my friend had completed them, in order to spawn after the tricky jumps that addled my preteen brain. Or maybe the game was just a bit rubbish. Either way, we got through it.
Aiming to rekindle our childhood, we logged onto Split Fiction for the first time last week. I loaded up the full game, he the Friend’s Pass version. And then it all went downhill.
How To Get Split Fiction’s Friend’s Pass To Work
First, we needed to be friends on EA. That’s a fairly simple requirement, right? Wrong. While I could add him as a friend through Split Fiction, he could only accept by loading up his PC, installing Origin, and navigating to my request. Alright, now to play.
Again, we were premature. I tried to add him to my game. And again. No notifications were popping on his screen. Thankfully, a quick Google revealed the problem: he’s on PS5 and I’m on Xbox Series X. Once he’d turned on crossplay invitations in his settings, the notifications started popping up. But only briefly.
The invite to play would appear on his screen for a split second. It was like some kind of punishing rhythm game, where we had to navigate the lag of our WhatsApp call, the timing of sending invitations, and his reactions to the notification popping up. But even when he managed to nail the timing, we still couldn’t connect.
Sometimes we’d get a loading wheel, sometimes we’d get a full-on error code. It just didn’t want to work. However, we persevered, Googled, and kept trying. Eventually, we connected. There was no trick or hack, we just kept trying the same thing over and over. So much for Einstein’s theory of madness, eh?
After that, the game was a breeze. We played through about a quarter of the game in one evening, and had a great time. The puzzles were fun, a couple were marginally challenging, and we died in lots of very silly ways. It was exactly the nostalgic fun we’d hoped for. But I’m not looking forward to doing it again.
I can’t wait to play more Split Fiction with my mate, but I know we’ll have to go through the connection rigmarole all over again. It took us 40 minutes last time! While we don’t have the EA hoops to jump through this time, I’m still expecting it to take a while. It’s worth the faff to play the game and save ourselves the price of a triple-A video game, but the service could be a whole lot smoother to say the least.
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