Split Fiction review for PC, PS5, Xbox Series X

As someone who grew up in an age when terms like “couch co-op” and “local multiplayer” didn’t exist – back in the pre-internet stone age, after all, local multiplayer was literally the only option if you wanted to play with others – the work Hazelight Studios are doing to bring back local co-op warms my heart. With It Takes Two a few years ago and now with Split Fiction, they’ve shown that there’s still a place for multiplayer games that aren’t online shooters or party games.

The thing is, while their hearts are in the right place, I can’t help but feel that Split Fiction also shows the limits of what they want to do. Or, at the very least, it’s a game that needs to be approached very differently than It Takes Two.

It Takes Two, after all, was very much a platformer that you didn’t necessarily need to be into games to enjoy. It was basically a fun, well-written romantic comedy that also happened to be a video game, and it was the sort of game you could play with, say, a significant other even if they didn’t know much about games.

Now, I’ll admit that this is a purely personal nitpick with the game, so it may very well not apply to most (or maybe even any other) cases. But Split Fiction is definitely something else entirely. It’s more of a game game, in the sense that it requires much more knowledge of the language of video games, to say nothing of skill. I played Split Fiction with my wife, entirely on the basis that she actually enjoyed It Takes Two; the connection between the two games made this one an easy sell, even though she’s not at all into games. As you can imagine, she’s not particularly good at them.

Consequently, much of Split Fiction was kind of baffling to her. Things like realizing that if a ledge or a pole is yellow, you can climb on it, or that you can double-jump and air-dash even if that defies the laws of physics, or that flying controls are often inverted – they make perfect sense to me, as someone who’s been playing games for decades, but they’re a lot less obvious if you’re not familiar with all those things.

It’s easy enough to just say, “Get good” (though perhaps a little less easy to say that to your spouse), but compared to the way some Nintendo games allow for less-skilled players to take part in the action via easier modes, it definitely shows a lack of imagination on the part of Hazelight. There are places here and there where Split Fiction allows for a disparity in player skill level (for example, there are parts where you’re both running for your life, and the game only resets to the last checkpoint if both players die), but they’re balanced out by areas where both players need to have a pretty solid understanding of what they’re doing.

Of course, if you have that second player who knows what they’re doing, then Split Fiction suddenly becomes a lot more fun. Thanks to its core premise – that the game’s two main characters have become trapped in overlapping worlds that they created as aspiring authors – you get two worlds to explore and discover: one a sci-fi world full of spaceships and hoverbikes, the other a fantasy world with dragons, trolls, and castles. Both are richly imagined, and lend themselves well to some pretty enjoyable platforming sequences, to say nothing of space battles and puzzles and other fun stuff.

Speaking of richly imagined, as you’d expect from the studio that gave us It Takes Two, Split Fiction does a pretty decent job of delivering on the game’s story as well. It has an inventive premise (as noted above, you play as a pair of aspiring writers, Mio and Rose, experiencing their sci-fi and fantasy worlds in person) and it uses that to explore the dynamics of the pair as they go from rivals to friends.

It should also be noted that Split Fiction makes it fairly easy to find a friend to play with online, if you’d rather branch off from the whole couch co-op thing: Split Fiction comes with a Friend’s Pass, so you can team up with a friend who doesn’t own the game.

Regardless of whether you want to play with someone else in-person or online, Split Fiction is well worth your time. It’s an excellent co-op adventure, and it’s easy to imagine the game garnering the same kind of following – and accolades – as It Takes Two.

Electronic Arts provided us with a Split Fiction PC code for review purposes.