The next game from It Takes Two and A Way Out developer Hazelight Studios is — what else? — a cooperative two-player adventure game. It’s called Split Fiction, and it looks like Hazelight’s most ambitious project to date.
Revealed Thursday at The Game Awards 2024, Split Fiction is an action-heavy platforming adventure game that blends classic sci-fi and fantasy themes in a way that evokes the developer’s past work and the spectacle of Nintendo’s recent Super Mario games.
Split Fiction promises to deliver “some crazy shit,” Hazelight Studios head Josef Fares told me during a recent preview of the game.
Fares’ description of his new game seems pretty accurate, based on what I played cooperatively with him during a hands-on tour of Split Fiction. In one level, we were riding on flying dragons in a medieval world. In another, we played as spherical robots, each with its own unique set of abilities. I also played as a pig that flew through the air with the power of farts. I snowboarded in a level that was eerily reminiscent of the SSX series. One level looked like it was straight out of Tron. Another was set inside a massive hourglass. In other words, I never knew what to expect next from Hazelight’s new game.
The premise of Split Fiction’s wild sci-fi/fantasy mashup centers on two rival authors: Mio and Zoe. The two become trapped in a simulation of their own stories — Mio’s sci-fi worlds and Zoe’s fantasy worlds — by an evil tech bro who’s trying to steal their work. The women are forced to cooperate in order to escape and, along the way, become friends. Puzzles, fast-paced platforming challenges, and boss fights stand in their way, and players will need to learn and exploit level-specific abilities to overcome it all.
Mio and Zoe will travel back and forth between their worlds, switching the split-screen action up between sci-fi themes and fantasy themes. In some cases, the duo will experience a genre switch mid-level; Hazelight has tucked hidden side missions across the game that promise to keep things fresh and keep players guessing about what new mechanics will be introduced.
The huge variance in experiences in Split Fiction immediately reminded me of Nintendo games Super Mario Odyssey and Super Mario Bros. Wonder, games that constantly introduced a series of dazzling, level-specific mechanics that players may only see once or twice.
Fares said that Split Fiction’s constantly changing gameplay has been challenging to pull off, but that Hazelight’s ethos — “We fuck shit up without fucking up” — helps them meet their goal of creative freedom and experimentation with a relatively small team.
“The number one thing is taking all these mechanics and polishing them,” Fares told me. “Early in production, when you [design] them, you sometimes think, OK, we won’t be able to do that. In a game like Devil May Cry, they can work on the combat for three, four years. We cannot. So we have to make it feel as good as we can. When you’re playing [Split Fiction], you’re not thinking, ‘Oh, I understand they don’t have [infinite] time.’ As a player you just expect it. Coming up with ideas and prototyping them is quite fast, but it’s taking them to a level where it feels nice that is the challenge.”
Split Fiction will follow a similar model employed by Hazelight’s previous games, It Takes Two and A Way Out, called the Friend’s Pass. That pass will allow one player who owns the game to invite a friend to play with them for free. Better still, Split Fiction will support cross-play across PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X, making it even easier to play co-op with a partner.
Hazelight Studios and publisher Electronic Arts will release Split Fiction on March 6, 2025 for PlayStation 5, Windows PC (via Steam, Epic Games Store, and the EA app), and Xbox Series X. The game costs $49.99.
Source：https://www.polygon.com/news/495453/hazelight-studios-split-fiction-release-date-trailer
