First preview of Split Fiction: We played Josef Fares’ new co-op game

I went into my meeting with Joseph almost completely blind.Screw the Oscars!” Fares to play his new game Split Fiction. I knew the title and knew, to no one’s surprise, that it was another co-op game, as has become its calling card after Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, A Way Out and It Takes Two . That’s it. So when he started the build, handed me one of the controllers, and we started playing it together, I was probably as surprised as you were when you saw the reveal trailer at the Game Awards. It has absolutely nothing to do with his previous games – thematically and definitively visually – and it’s clear that with each new game, Fares and his team at Hazelight are giving players more and more agency over what happens on the screen.

If you haven’t seen the reveal trailer – narrated by Fares – please stop reading and watch the trailer below now. It’ll be a great overview of what I’ll talk about briefly (I say briefly because Fares took us through the whole game – even to the final level! – to show a lot of different things that Split Fiction does, and I don’t want to give away anything specific, other than the flying fart pigs part, and that’s definitely what I want to talk about. To recap: Split Fiction is a future-oriented science fiction game in which aspiring writers Mio and Zoe – named, Fares tells me, after his two daughters – visit Rader Publishing, a company that can bring a writer’s story to life in a book. A kind of Star Trek holodeck. The women don’t know each other, and through one Due to a technical failure suffered by the publisher for trying to steal her ideas, their stories literally overlap, meaning Zoe is thrown into Mio’s dark and gritty science fiction world and the two find themselves involuntarily caught between that place and Zoe’s magic and Tossed back and forth in the forest in a magical fantasy realm.

It’s an absolutely perfect premise that allows for all kinds of gameplay, like wielding lightsabers, anti-gravity boots, fireball spells, and riding dragonback – among many others. I tried out a whole range of scenarios as Fares bounced us from level to level. A few things were immediately clear: First, Hazelight has improved its performance in the graphics department. Despite the stylized cartoon graphics of It Takes Two, Split Fiction looks better across generations than the studio’s last project. It’s not Hellblade 2 by any means, but it now looks like a proper current-gen AAA game. And secondly, you’re now playing a proper third-person action-adventure game with full camera control, platforming, combat and more. There’s still a fair amount of button mashing and timing to do in various co-op interactions, but you have more complete and direct control over what Mio and Zoe are up to than you ever had with Cody and May. Both are very good things!

As you switch back and forth between science fiction and fantasy levels, the game worlds and gameplay change completely. To keep the co-op campaign fresh, various optional side story missions provide additional variety, and this is where things get really strange. I played a lot of them, including the scenario where the rolling ball is transformed into a suit of armor and the absolutely hilarious stage where you fly around as pigs, powered by your own farts. I also got to be a giant fantasy gorilla, do tricks around a track on a hoverboard like a sci-fi SSX, jump past and later ride a hungry sand shark, and much more. Fares said he really wants players to experience these, and if they’re all as fun and edgy as the ones I tried, then I don’t think he has to worry because people will have plenty of motivation to do so have Find the next crazy optional mission.

Split Fiction – First screenshots