Video game auteur’s latest two-player tale is another bizarre hit

Director Josef Fares is most well known for two things: giving improvised and expletive-laden speeches at The Game Awards, and helming inventive co-operative adventure games for two players. It Takes Two was a breakout hit for Fares and the team at Swedish studio Hazelight in 2021, marrying unique and zany co-operative gameplay with a deeply uneven story about a divorcing couple. Split Fiction is a compelling and worthy follow-up, improving on the genre’s strengths while occasionally doubling down on its weaknesses.

There really are no other games like these. Mandating exactly two players, either sitting together on the couch or connecting over the internet, the story pushes dual protagonists through a rapid-fire set of evolving and unexpected challenges, meaning you and your partner are constantly figuring out the best ways to co-operate. At its best, Split Fiction is the ideal game-night for two, especially if you prefer traditional console games to competitive online fare. At its worst, it may have you wishing you opted to binge a TV show instead.

The setup here is that a giant Amazon-type tech behemoth has come up with a way to steal stories directly from writers’ brains, turning them into realistic VR simulations in the process, and has tricked a group of would-be authors into being its guinea pigs with the lure of a lucrative publishing deal. But an unexpected incident leads to a pair of writers – Zoe and Mio – getting their simulations entangled, with their consciousnesses trapped inside.

It’s a premise that doesn’t hold up to a lot of scrutiny, but the upshot is that you have a kind-hearted fantasy writer from the country paired with a hardened sci-fi-loving city slicker, and they have to work together to survive the dangerous tales they’ve each created.

Every level (and, frequently, in smaller asides within levels) you’re given new powers and abilities relevant to the story, with Zoe and Mio typically serving distinct roles. In one fantasy setting Zoe can shrink into a fairy while Mio can grow into a beast. In one sci-fi setting they’re both cyber ninjas, where Mio can alter gravity for herself and Zoe for other objects. So one of you ends up on top of a flying truck, while the other runs along the sides of the traffic, and you both need to organise platforms for each other.

At its core this is a platforming adventure game of the kind you might have played in the early 2000s, but with constant gameplay switch-ups and the need to co-operate throughout, and that variety is absolutely the highlight. One brief side story is set in a giant hourglass, themed like a blend of Prince of Persia and Dune, where you have to ride skeletal sand worms. In another you play as pigs, one with a springy body and one with magic rainbow farts, through a story Zoe conceived as a child while learning about some of the grim realities of the farm.

In contrast to the sillier sections, the longer standard running and jumping can drag on a bit. But the game’s major problem will be one familiar to you if you played It Takes Two; the overarching narrative and its writing are fundamentally cringy. Unlikeable characters have overly long conversations in which they just speak their motivations and grievances out loud, repeatedly hammering home the same conflicts with nothing interesting to say. But this is especially egregious here, where the game is explicitly about storytelling.

One second you might be growing and shrinking, the next you might be flying dragons, but you’re always working together.Credit:

For people who are supposed to be writers, the protagonists seem exclusively to create the most generic and hamfisted genre narratives, with awful cliched dialogue and basically no subtext or deeper meaning. An early sci-fi section features a killer parking robot, in a story inspired by the time Mio got a parking ticket, and that’s about the standard you can expect throughout. At a meta level there is a more successful commentary on creative industry, with a publisher literally siphoning the magic out of earnest creators, but it’s similarly literal.

Thankfully the game-play ideas are much more imaginative and varied, to the point that I legitimately find it shocking that such genius and such mundanity can live together in the same experience. One sci-fi motorcycle getaway sequence features a swift procession of different driving and shooting sections, including one where Zoe needs to use a smartphone (trying to unlock it, solving visual CAPTCHA puzzles to prove she’s a human), while Mio keeps them from dying by manoeuvring through a cyber highway. It’s brief but hilarious, with each player needing to focus but also struggling not to pay attention to the wild things the other is doing.

Split Fiction is not the first video game to feature brilliant game-play and a weak story. In fact, you could argue that the majority of them do. It’s the brazen choice to focus so much of the experience on storytelling here that really accentuates it. Still, if you and your regular movie night partner are the kind of people who can laugh at schlocky dialogue and outrageously daft plots, the surprise and excitement of the game-play here carries the experience to make it one of the great modern two-player experiences.

It’s also worth noting that the intimate two-player premise of the game is refreshing in and of itself, especially coming from publisher EA, which tends towards the live service and microtransaction side of things. It’s nice to play a finite game with a close friend, and as with It Takes Two you can even play with a distant pal over the internet, with only one of you needing to have purchased the game.

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