Bottom Line: Hazelight has done it again — Split Fiction is a relentlessly inventive two-player adventure that refuses to reuse a good idea when it could invent three more. The story is thin, but the design is genius.
The Gameplay Loop
Most action-adventure games find a good idea and grind it into powder over 15 hours. 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 your fingers memorize the timing — 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. My co-op partner and I kept saying "one more level" for three hours past when we meant to stop.
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. I wanted to care more about Mio and Zoe than I did. I never once wanted the game to slow down.