What’s better than playing a game as a cyberpunk ninja, shapeshifting ape, flying dragon and hopping hot dog? Playing it with a friend on the couch next to you — and relying on each other to move from one wacky, earnest adventure to another.
In a warehouse in Hollywood, California, I sat down next to a stranger and played a few hours of EA’s Hazelight Studios’ next game, Split Fiction. By the end of our session, which capped off with a particularly grueling pinball boss, we high-fived and shook hands. Bonded through narrow escapes and clutch wins, we were no longer strangers.
Collaboration has been the appeal of Hazelight’s prior games, its 2018 debut A Way Out and its award-winning 2021 follow-up It Takes Two. But whereas those games centered on well-established relationships — between outlaw brothers and a married couple on the brink of divorce, respectively — Split Fiction imitates my journey: Two strangers, Zoe and Mio, are shoved together and must rely on each other to escape a series of progressively outlandish challenges.
In one segment, players either fly on their dragon (left) or roll and ride (right) — Zoe and Mio always have different yet complementary mechanics.
Hazelight has built a reputation for inventive mechanics in its cooperative sections and moving stories. The former make up a lot of the trailer showcases and memorable gameplay moments from past games. From my few hours playing, I can tell that Split Fiction will have a lot of those, too. The studio spends tons of time developing one-off experiences that feel cinematic, Hazelight founder and Split Fiction director Joseph Fares told me.
“We have scenes [in Split Fiction] with dragons that goes on for ten minutes where they have big dragons because [the players] evolve the dragons — and just one dragon took, like, 18 months to create,” Fares said, emphasizing that Hazelight doesn’t want these moments to overstay their welcome. “If you look at a great movie, you have a great scene, you don’t repeat that scene, because it takes the edge out of it.”
While these sequences are flashy, the overarching story is just as important. Each game Fares and his teams have made has a different thematic focus regarding the relationship between the two player characters, even going back to the pre-Hazelight game Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons.
“Every [one of our] games has a word to it: Brothers is ‘sorrow,’ A Way Out is ‘trust,’ It Takes Two is ‘collaboration,’ and this one’s about friendships,” Fares said, describing Split Fiction as a “buddy movie” featuring two entirely different strangers who grow closer as you play. “We’re going to go deep into their trauma, their back stories and learn more about them.”
Split Fiction’s mechanics: The core of a Hazelight game
My preview kicked off at the start of Split Fiction, when Mio and Zoe show up to the same call for writers to come see their creative stories visualized by a corporation, Rader Publishing, and its cutting-edge virtual reality pod technology. But when Mio gets unnerved by the company’s exploitative vibes, she stumbles into Zoe’s pod — and players are off to the races, playing through stages made of each character’s genre stories. Naturally, this leads to learning the inspiration behind Mio’s exciting science fiction yarns and Zoe’s cozy fantasy stories.
Hazelight uses this premise to put players in a roulette of scenarios, and what I saw ran a wide gamut of co-op platforming mainstays, from jumping between cybercars to shapeshifting through fantastical lakes and valleys to hopping around a grill as a hot dog (the sillier vignettes are optional side stories).
With several co-op games under Hazelight’s belt, Fares prided his developers not just on how much they’ve developed their technical tools but also in refining the variety of mechanics (that is, the unique abilities given to players in each stage) to be fun but not overstay their welcome — which are arguably the studio’s signature elements.
“That is [the] tricky part with a Hazelight game: finding these mechanics that kind of feed each other and help each other and complement each other in a great way,” Fares said.
