The co-op game’s home stretch is a stunning technical and design achievement
Split Fiction’s entire schtick is that it swaps back and forth between virtual recreations of its two leads’ stories. Mio, the angsty introvert of the duo, writes science fiction to cope with her difficult upbringing. Zoe, a bubbly fantasy writer, escapes into stories of dungeons and dragons to process her trauma. While playing Hazelight’s latest co-op adventure, I was curious how the action-platformer would spotlight both its leads’ fictions in its final levels, assuming it would no longer be alternating between the sci-fi and fantasy worlds. Would it take place in some kind of neutral world that wouldn’t show favor to either of its heroes? Could Hazelight maybe just hone in on one of their stories for simplicity’s sake? As it turns out, the studio didn’t take any of the easy options, and the result is an incredible display of the team’s technical skill and inventive game design.
In Split Fiction, Mio and Zoe have been trapped in a virtual reality that extracts ideas from authors’ brains, to be packaged and sold by a tech corporation called Rader Publishing. An accident occurs, and Mio and Zoe are stuck in a shared simulation, being thrown back and forth between sci-fi and fantasy stories, the pair working together to battle through each other’s imagination.
Beyond the occasional side quest, the simulation keeps a divide between both worlds, but as the pair tear down the facade from the inside it becomes more unstable, and they’re almost able to break free and go back to their real world. However, in a last-ditch effort to save his brain-scraping machine, Rader of Rader Publishing forcibly enters the simulation himself, destabilizing all that’s come before to introduce the final 30 minutes of the game.
At first, it appears both players are, for the first time, existing in two separate worlds. Mio wakes up in her sci-fi story, while Zoe is thrown into her fantasy world. But after some brief platforming, the two find each other, yet each side of the game’s split screen depicts entirely different levels. Structurally, they are identical, but where Mio sees buildings and gaseous planets in the distance, Zoe sees a magical forest. Split Fiction’s co-op gameplay requires communication and coordination, but it was all while occupying the same space. Now, because the level is rendered as both sci-fi and fantasy, some objects are only interactive for one player, while the other has to find some way to help them from their “side.” For example, something that appears as just a pushable box to Mio might be a bouncy mushroom for Zoe, something she can use to jump high enough to reach an objective. Or perhaps some flora in the fantasy world could appear as a computer terminal in the sci-fi one. Split Fiction mostly delegates puzzle-solving and combat roles by giving its characters different tools. In the final level, that division of labor becomes inherent in the world design. Mio and Zoe are occupying the same space, but only one of them can see the way forward at a time. It leads to silly moments like when Zoe has to swim to reach an objective and Mio can’t see how she’s floating above what—to her—looks like a chasm. These two worlds are rendered simultaneously, with both characters moving through their respective worlds, affecting the other, all without once showing any signs of performance trouble. It’s a clever way to give sci-fi and fantasy equal weight in the final push, but it doesn’t stop at one impressive technical feat.
As the simulation continues to fall apart, Split Fiction starts playing with the boundaries of everything you thought you knew up to that point. Hazards appear in Mio’s sci-fi world that she has to avoid by moving to the right side of the screen where Zoe’s fantasy story takes up space, then suddenly there’s an onslaught of enemies, aircrafts, and obstacles blocking your progress that requires both players to rapidly move between both levels, as you watch both characters and the worlds around them seamlessly shift from one genre to the other.
But it doesn’t end there. After a brief boss fight with a kaiju version of Rader in the simulation’s home, Mio and Zoe are sent back to their respective worlds and all the rules you’ve been taught about how these intertwined worlds work go out the window. The splitscreen that was once just a dividing line to help both players navigate the world from their perspective becomes a chaotic obstacle you have to navigate. The bar in the middle of the screen rotates, pivots, and shifts in ways that constantly change the confines of both the sci-fi and fantasy worlds, exposing both players to different dangers and paths forward.
The split down the middle of your television becomes a weapon for your enemy to wield, depriving you of literal screen space where you can safely exist, moving the divide between both worlds to push you into the dangerous sides of your own creation. There’s a section where Split Fiction’s camera shifts to a top-down perspective, with the splitscreen spinning around like a carousel, exposing dangers from the fantasy world like piranhas, or science-fiction industrial grinders, and all you can do is frantically jump between worlds until Rader throws something else at you. It’s challenging and requires you to pull from your knowledge of every previous level to recognize hazards from one world and maneuver your way to safety in the other. Split Fiction manages to pull this off without a hitch, which is another incredible technical feat on top of being stunning gameplay.
There’s something kinda poetic about an artless corpo having to wield Mio and Zoe’s created worlds to take them down because he’s incapable of imagining something of his own. The final boss fight, against Rader’s giant god form, is literally just him reaching into both of their stories and tossing whatever beast or machine he can in hopes that it might save his creation. Split Fiction’s final level is relentless, dragging both players between science and magic without a moment’s respite. Words don’t do it justice. Its visual splendor is mixed with clever and challenging game design, all tied in a tight thematic bow. It’s the kind of thing you can only experience to its fullest once, and I’m already miffed I’ll never get to experience the delight of playing it for the first time with my co-op partner, slackjawed and gobsmacked at how Hazelight pulled it off.
