Split Fiction

Josef Fares and Hazelight Studios have spent a decade quietly building the most reliable brand in cooperative gaming. A Way Out proved they could sustain a two-player narrative. It Takes Two turned marriage counseling into a physics playground and swept awards doing it. Split Fiction, released March 6, 2025, is the studio’s most ambitious swing yet, and it lands with force.

The premise is pulpy sci-fi with a metafictional wink. Mio, a hardened science-fiction author, and Zoe, a wide-eyed fantasy writer, are lured into a machine by a predatory publisher that harvests creative ideas from writers’ minds. Trapped inside their own imaginations, the two must scramble through each other’s stories — Mio’s neon dystopias and Zoe’s dragon-filled kingdoms — to escape before the machine strips their memories clean. It’s a flimsy scaffold, but a clever one: the sci-fi-versus-fantasy split gives Hazelight license to build anything, and they build everything.

This is a game engineered from the ground up for two humans in the same fiction, and nothing else. There is no single-player mode. There is no AI partner. You bring a friend or you don’t play. That’s a bold market position in an industry addicted to solo campaigns and battle passes, and Hazelight doubles down with the returning Friend’s Pass — buy one copy, and a second player can join for free on any platform. For a $49.99 release, that’s the most generous distribution model in mainstream gaming, and it’s the reason the game spread through friend groups like wildfire. It sold the way word-of-mouth hits do: one person buys, two people play, and both go tell four more.

• Relentless mechanical variety: Nearly every level introduces new abilities, controls, and physics rules — then discards them before they wear out their welcome. You rarely do the same thing twice.
• Two contrasting worlds: Gritty cyberpunk sci-fi and lush high-fantasy alternate constantly, each with its own tone, palette, and toolset. One minute you’re a cyber ninja; the next you’re taming a dragon.
• True cooperative design: Split-screen at all times, with puzzles and set-pieces that demand real-time communication and asymmetric roles. Neither player is a passenger.
• The Friend’s Pass: A second player joins for free, cross-platform, without owning the game. Local and online play both supported.

The Gameplay Loop

Most action-adventure games find a good idea and grind it into powder. Split Fiction does the opposite, and it’s the boldest design decision in the game. Hazelight treats mechanics as disposable. You’ll unlock a grappling hook, master a set of rooms built around it, and then — just as the timing becomes second nature — the game takes it away and hands you something new. Gravity boots. A shared dragon mount. Twin laser swords that must be swung in sequence. Time-manipulation orbs. A shrinking-and-growing mechanic that turns the geometry of a room into a puzzle.

The pace this creates is intoxicating. There is no filler. There is no “second act sag.” The design philosophy is closer to a theme park than a video game: each level is a self-contained ride, and the moment one ends, you’re strapped into the next. It’s exhausting in the best sense — the kind of structure built to keep a duo saying “one more level” long past the planned stopping point.

What makes it work is discipline. It would be easy for this firehose of ideas to feel scattershot. It doesn’t, because every mechanic is tuned around the same core truth: two players, two screens, one shared goal. Even the wildest new toy is legible within seconds because the cooperative framing never changes. You always know your job is to coordinate with the person next to you.

Asymmetry and Communication

The real engine here is forced interdependence. Hazelight builds encounters where each player controls half of a solution. One player rotates a platform while the other jumps across it. One holds a portal open while the other sprints through. The design constantly punishes solo heroics and rewards the couple who talk to each other — “wait, go now, no, MY left.” This is where the game generates its best moments, and its funniest arguments.

The difficulty is calibrated for accessibility, not mastery. Deaths reset you instantly to a nearby checkpoint with zero penalty, which keeps frustration low and momentum high. Hardcore players may find the platforming forgiving. That’s the point. Hazelight is designing for the couple where one person games nightly and the other picks up a controller twice a year. The game meets both where they are, and that inclusivity is a feature, not a compromise.

The Story Problem

Here’s where the critical eye earns its keep. The narrative is the weakest part of the package. The setup is serviceable and the villain — a smug tech-publisher archetype — is thinly drawn. Mio and Zoe’s odd-couple arc hits every beat you’d predict: friction, grudging respect, emotional breakthrough, teary resolution. The dialogue swings between charming and groan-inducing, and the “power of creativity” theme is laid on thick.

But — and this matters — the story is a delivery mechanism, not the point. It exists to justify the machine that lets Hazelight throw you into dragon-riding one hour and cyber-ninja combat the next. Judged as literature, it’s average. Judged as connective tissue between the best set-pieces in co-op gaming, it does its job. It’s easy to wish the writing gave Mio and Zoe more depth — and just as easy to be grateful the game never slows down long enough to dwell on it.

The art direction earns its dual mandate. The sci-fi worlds lean into wet-neon cyberpunk — rain-slicked megacities, chrome, hover traffic — while the fantasy realms glow with painterly warmth, all rolling meadows and impossible castles. The contrast is the point, and the visual whiplash of jumping between them never gets old.

By design, this is a game built to look polished to a mirror shine. Split-screen rendering is punishing — two full scenes drawn at once — yet the set-piece spectacle (collapsing towers, aerial dragon chases) is staged with the confidence of a studio that knows exactly what its engine can carry. This is a studio that ships finished games, and the care shows in every transition.

On Steam, this is the definitive way to play. A controller is strongly recommended over mouse-and-keyboard — the platforming and timing-based puzzles were clearly built for analog sticks — and the PC version is built to scale across hardware with painless online cross-play. Two friends on two PCs, one Friend’s Pass, and you’re in.

The Nintendo version is the more interesting story. Constant split-screen rendering is a genuine technical burden on Switch-class hardware, and visual concessions — softer resolution and effects — are the expected trade for keeping the frame rate stable. What the platform gives back is the thing this game was born for: couch co-op. Two Joy-Cons, one screen, no setup. The intimacy of sitting shoulder-to-shoulder, shouting at a shared display, is exactly the experience Hazelight designs around. If you want fidelity, play on Steam. If you want the purest expression of the game’s soul, hand someone a Joy-Con.

Split Fiction is the rare sequel that outruns its acclaimed predecessor by refusing to repeat it. Where It Takes Two perfected a formula, this game abandons formula altogether, spending mechanical ideas at a rate no other studio would dare. The story won’t move you. The design will floor you. That trade is worth making, and it’s what puts this among the very best of its kind.

Hazelight has now built three consecutive proofs that cooperative games can be more than a mode bolted onto a shooter — they can be the whole point. Split Fiction is their finest argument yet. Find a partner, split the screen, and don’t stop until the credits roll. You’ll both remember it.