Video games are too solitary a hobby. While gaming is much more social now than ever, with games often being used more as digital social spaces than competitive environments, it's been impossible to shake the image of the lone gamer in their bedroom tapping away at buttons in silence. Even many multiplayer games can feel surprisingly desolate, with players muting their microphones so they can hunt you in silence, becoming faceless opponents instead of people.
That's why the games from developer Hazelight are so incredibly refreshing. Hazelight's two previous games since their 2014 founding -- A Way Out and It Takes Two -- are some of the only big-budget, dedicated co-op video games you can play today. These games force you to find another player you know to join you throughout the entire adventure -- someone you can communicate with to solve puzzles, cooperate, and find the path forward.
Real human connection is what makes these games so compelling. The team at Hazelight knows this, and that's why Split Fiction tightly follows in the footsteps of its predecessors. Here we have a writer duo, Mio and Zoe, who visit a publisher for an experimental trial in which they can enter a fully realized virtual world that resembles their stories. Thanks to an early mishap, Mio and Zoe end up in the same world, and the machine attempts to build it using both of their stories -- a mismatch of joyous high fantasy and dystopian sci-fi.
These clashing story tropes match their personalities. Mio is moody with a cold exterior, while Zoe's boundless optimism and positivity can feel suffocating. At first, they begrudgingly cooperate as the world around them distorts in unpredictable ways, but as the machine replicates their stories -- stories that reveal dark truths about the authors -- they come to understand, respect, and bond with one another. Early critiques and criticisms about writing styles and world-building fall away as they learn to see the beauty and excitement in what the other creates.
The slow-burn development of their relationship feels natural and rewarding to watch grow over time, and that's just flavor for the in-game action each player undertakes. Most of Split Fiction is a 3D platformer, as you jump, double jump, air dash, and grapple your way through environments, but as with It Takes Two, the game consistently introduces new mechanics to keep things fresh. Each main level comes with a fresh twist and starts you off solving a few basic challenges, before slowly introducing more and more difficult obstacles to surmount. It's a design philosophy that mimics the New Super Mario Bros. series, squeezing all of the juice out of each idea, and that's no bad thing.
To keep those longer main levels feeling fresh, you can find Side Stories hidden away in each. Side Stories are smaller ideas or projects the writers were working on, and are often far more experimental. One is dedicated to gliding through a sci-fi world with a wingsuit, hot on the heels of flying traffic, while another is sketched as you play it, drawing weapons into the hands of your characters and monsters into the world. These Side Stories allow the developers to experiment, and they also happen to include dozens of subtle (and less subtle) references to other video games, including Dark Souls, Sonic the Hedgehog, SSX Tricky, and more.
It's a smart game, though it does feel a bit too familiar at times. It Takes Two had more environments to swap between as the game progressed, but Split Fiction's strict sci-fi and fantasy split feels far more binary. When you ignore aesthetics and focus solely on mechanics, even some of the abilities and puzzles can feel like they've been done before for anyone who played It Takes Two. While It Takes Two was radically different from A Way Out and set the bar for co-op games, Split Fiction feels like it's emulating previous successes.
At least, that's true for most of the game. The climactic couple of hours in Split Fiction are distinctly brilliant, moving beyond the ideas of previous Hazelight games and introducing something unique that completely justifies some previous design decisions that could leave players feeling puzzled. The entire game leads up to that moment, and it's fantastic, though it's hard not to believe that some of the tedium of earlier stages would've been alleviated if some of the ideas from the bombastic finale could be found elsewhere in the game.
In an industry where many game directors fancy themselves movie guys, it's wild that we have Josef Fares, the man in charge of Hazelight. Fares is a movie guy, you see. Scan down his IMDb page and you'll see eight films and one TV series before he shifted to video games. But he's not here to make movie games. He's here to lean into the medium's strength -- interactivity -- and serve an audience forgotten by developers as technology has leaped forward.
Fares and his team at Hazelight have become the split-screen co-op studio, and Split Fiction is as good as the genre gets. That final section stretches what's possible in split-screen co-op games, delivering a breathless hour of pure genius that reminds you of the first time you saw the 360-degree spin and bullet time camera techniques in "The Matrix."
As long as you're playing with someone you like who's familiar with games, you will likely enjoy Split Fiction. It is fun throughout, but it only feels truly inventive and interesting -- like It Takes Two did -- in that final section. Regardless, if you want to play a great co-op game with a friend, Split Fiction is in the top ten games you could choose by default. It's a genre that is distinctly underserved, and each time a great co-op game releases, it's a cause for celebration. Split Fiction is here, and if you've got a co-op partner, it's one of the best games you'll play this year.