It felt like Groundhog Day. There I was, several hours into a new Hazelight Studios game, and the giggly, slack-jawed atmosphere had given way to chronic fatigue. Predictable character development arcs were coming to their inevitable climax, and regardless of the ostensibly relatable subject matter, I was groaning through every cutscene. Suddenly, the innovative gameplay gimmicks began to feel like they were only there to pad out a series of unnecessary chapters, replacing their contextually sensitive forerunners.

Hazelight Studios has done it again — in that, the studio has delivered a wonderfully inventive adventure game that overstays its welcome. I thoroughly enjoyed Split Fiction until I didn’t, and then the finale briefly won me back with its brimming mechanical genius, and I was left feeling bittersweet. It’s a tale as old as It Takes Two, another exhilarating adventure that loses the plot two-thirds of the way through. It was painful to slog through an onslaught of painstakingly made sequences because I didn’t care about where this was going. Back in the day, I gave It Takes Two an 81% score in Wireframe Magazine and called it “a singular co-op experience with an unfortunately shoddy story.” And despite its 20-million-plus sales, frothing word-of-mouth admiration and numerous GOTY awards, I stand by that statement, which unfortunately applies neatly to Split Fiction, too.

In Split Fiction, you play as a struggling fantasy writer and a struggling sci-fi writer who, under the dangling auspices of a publishing deal, agree to an experimental procedure involving a machine that can realise their fledgling story ideas as playable experiences. The headstrong sci-fi writer tries to back out at the eleventh hour, only to be pushed into the placid fantasy writer’s thought bubble, causing a cataclysmic merge. As a result, unlikely partners Mio and Zoe are forced to chart these intertextual dreamscapes in chase of glitches that can bring the system down from within (and expose the idea-stealing corruption underpinning it.) Meanwhile, because no writer can resist losing a part of themselves to their work, the more uncomfortable parts of Mio and Zoe’s real lives start to bleed into these worlds as they progress, summoning Jungian shadows to conquer.

Realm royale

Each chapter in Split Fiction is strictly fantasy or sci-fi themed, with side story interludes that allow for refreshing breaks into the other aesthetic scattered throughout. It’s a healthy spine that provides solid momentum as you work through the game, which includes a generational run of vignettes that cover a delicious smorgasbord of genres. Hazelight comfortably replicates and codifies some of the trendiest gameplay loops of all time, from God of War to Metroid, Crash Bandicoot, SSX and others in between.

Taken broadly, Split Fiction is an incredible advert for Hazelight’s developmental prowess — they are the gods of the vertical slice. Here is a studio of roughly 80 people that can churn out the kind of engaging, sticky, memorable gameplay that studios thrice its size often fail to conjure… dozens of times within the scope of a single product. I’m sure the IP beholders are falling over themselves to court the Swedish studio into making something more mainstream as we speak. I was at any given time a farting pig, a paste-quiffed tooth avoiding an evil dentist, a spherical swarm of drones that doubled as a ferry, and so much more. It was all brilliant. And yes, each new ability is introduced in that delightful Nintendo way, where you cut your teeth on a tutorialising puzzle, and the challenge ramp grows towards a final exam boss battle. Expected at this point, but by no means easy to implement.

Elsewhere, the visuals are routinely astounding (the material work is meticulous), and its references are consistently thoughtful. It runs perfectly and the puzzles, platforming and combat err on the right side of challenging without feeling unfair. Post-Rift Apart, I find it’s easy to take for granted that games can now seamlessly launch us into entirely new environments at a moment’s notice. Still, it’s worth recognising how mind-blowing it is from an engineering perspective to see entire realms forge themselves into being before my eyes, especially when they are fog-thick with cool details. Split Fiction later dares to collapse these pocket realities into one another, resulting in an awe-inspiring sequence that will be front of mind during awards season, I’m sure.

Left on Thread

So what’s wrong with it? Well, spoilers, but it’s the story, and specifically, the pace at which it’s told. There are three main threads here:

Mio and Zoe are trapped in the machine and need to get back to their bodies
Mio and Zoe need to deal with unresolved subconscious traumas
The antagonist’s machine is breaking, and he will do anything to protect it

If Split Fiction could condense these three narrative projects into one tight story or hone in on one of them, then it would be a far more enjoyable narrative. But instead, they feel distinctly unmoored from eachother. Throughout the game, we deal with one at a time, hovering on disparate issues for prolonged periods so that the remaining threads lose their appeal and lustre.

There are eight chapters in total, but I was convinced we should be approaching the ending by the fourth one. As intriguing as the remaining gameplay proved, I would have been more than happy to leave it there and let Hazelight keep some of their ideas and cook up another one of these things, but no. As you trudge on, it doesn’t help that each section of the game follows a very rigid structure — puzzle platforming sections flanked by roughly three boss fights a chapter, all lousy with several phases that feel novel at the start of the game but obstructive by the end. At times, I was loudly begging for them to end — I had proven my mastery of these skills, but Split Fiction insisted on continuing with rote spot tests.

Split Fiction is not a subtle game, either. By the fifth level of a chapter, you can typically understand its overriding moral and subtext, even if there’s an enormous chunk ofthe game remaining to play if you wish to confront the (rather obvious) answers. It means that by the time you get to the emotional payoff, you’re so scatter-brained from distractions or tired of the same old that the climactic moment is robbed of all feeling. Yes, the posh Brit who sees the good in everything is hiding a dark past. And there’s a good reason for Mio’s fiscal motives and guarded pessimism. But the answers are exactly what you might expect, and the way they resolve, as dark, twisted jaunts into the psyche, feel hamfisted by the time you get there, not helped by a heavy helping of trite, overwhelmingly millennial dialogue.

…and I’m not kidding

It made me long for the halcyon days of A Way Out, a scrappier but crucially, much shorter game (roughly six hours) that felt distinctly satisfying to see through. There’s something to be said about the dynamic between Hazelight’s leads so far. We’ve had career criminals with oppositional personalities, divorcing parents, and now a, uh, sci-fi writer and a fantasy writer? Split Fiction tries to create a bouncy relationship between Mio and Zoe due to their differing aesthetic tastes, but it quickly feels forced because there’s no real reason why they would have a problem with eachother. Unlike Cody and May or Vincent and Leo, there’s no difference in strategy to bicker about — they are always on the same team.

The most interesting part of their stories is the past they’re hiding, but these individualistic journeys never justify the other person’s counsel. It’s like when you make an acquaintance on a group project and immediately forget about them afterwards. Polar opposites, fish out of water, stranger in a strange land… fine tropes, to be sure, but I was hoping for a little bit of subversion sauce to complement my visual feast.

Amidst all of this, Split Fiction’s antagonist, JD Rader, is completely sidelined as Mio and Zoe take their precious time to unravel their traumas in his otherwise terrible, no-good machine. A smattering of cutscenes kick it back to Rader’s office between chapters, where he liaises with a finger-wagging board and cajoles his workers, slowly descending into blinkered madness and ranting about ‘My Machine!’. There’s nothing more to him than his harebrained scheme, no backstory or reason for creating this impressive technology. His scenes aren’t meant to be comical, but it’s hard not to laugh at how one-dimensional his villainhood is and how separated it feels from Mio and Zoe’s journey. There’s a very intentional shift about halfway through where Split Fiction decides it will be about fighting Mio and Zoe’s emotional demons, so it’s always a surprise when Rader rears his head.

Post-pacing in Content World

Alas, I have to anticipate the response to my critique for a second with some cultural observation. It’s fair to say the value of a game is often judged by the amount of content it can provide. There’s this temporal angle to purchasing a full-price game, felt by pretty much everyone, where you feel like you need to get what you’re owed because of, among other things, the enduring socio-economic hardship of our times. Spending 60 quid on a six-hour game doesn’t feel good to the average consumer. I’ve only had two slices of pizza, but you’re taking the box away? What gives?

The underhand effect of this is that there’s minimal appeal for a critique that concerns a game’s pacing, especially from the perspective of someone who has received it for free. It’s just more game, right? More slices of pizza! And in this case, Split Fiction is already pretty short by contemporary standards, coming in at roughly 14 hours. And the gameplay is superb, enough to look past the mediocre narrative beneath it. Players do this all the time.

But at some point, I’ve eaten too much food at my favourite Chinese takeaway, right? Like, there’s a fifth of this Tupperware of Sweet and Sour Pork remaining, but buddy, I’m full, and it doesn’t taste nearly as good as when my stomach was empty. Plus, the new episode of Severance I had lined up with my meal has now finished, and there’s nothing else I want to watch right now. The back half of Split Fiction feels like putting a stream on for background noise and forcibly slurping the leftovers while fighting the effects of an incoming food coma.

So yeah, I wish Split Fiction was much shorter. Don’t get me wrong, it is possible to make a game of this length with a sensational story, but Split Fiction is not that game. It’s about on par with the scope of It Takes Two, so if you liked that and you’re not that bothered about its narrative, then by all means, check it out. In fact, I would recommend everyone to play this game, even if the writing is a bit naff. It’s still a lot of fun. But I’d love Hazelight’s next game to shave down the runtime or the onslaught of gameplay experiments to hone in on telling a solid story instead. It feels like every idea they had for a gimmick made it into Split Fiction, and maybe that’s a bad thing.

I will play everything this studio makes until the end of time, but I want Hazelight to crack this cooperative revival in its totality. The studio has carved out a genuinely independent niche and consistently produces successful new IPs — a rare sight in the modern market. But I can also observe how we may be seeing their efforts as a noble, iconoclastic pursuit and overlooking some of the sharp edges despite that. I hope the gushing acclaim for Split Fiction doesn’t override any self-reflection here. I don’t want to sit down for the studio’s next game and feel the fatigue approaching — I want it to grip my hand and pull me all the way to the end.

Jordan Oloman