REACTION - Split Fiction is just the right amount of unhinged
It Takes Two to find… A Way Out.
By Jonathan Garrett
16/12/24
Joseph Fares’ particular brand of relentless optimism is typically pitched with hyperbolic bluster. Thankfully, he now has the sales success, critical accolades, and wider sentiment to back up his confident persona. Hazelight’s latest co-op opus, Split Fiction, a medieval / sci-fi melting pot of ideas, appears to be striking a very fine balance between chaos and cohesion that is par for the course following It Takes Two’s resounding acclaim.
We’ve also had confirmation of various consumer friendly wins and appreciated design flourishes; the return of the friend pass (allowing a second player to jump in for free), the constant use of split screen even when playing online, and a clean graphical style very much reminiscent of Cody and May’s marital jaunt. Additional narrative details remain under wraps, but the rapid pacing of the reveal trailer and heavy emphasis on gameplay suggest a dev team in their element.
Although we’d love to see Hazelight return to more grounded fare (in much the same vein as A Way Out), there aren’t a huge number of polished, co-op narrative adventures out there that are willing to indulge experimentation with their genre and approach. We won’t have long to wait to see how it lands, with a bang tidy turnaround from announcement to release as Split Fiction targets a March 6th 2025 launch.
TARPS?
At the bottom of some of our articles, you’ll see a series of absurd looking images (with equally stupid, in joke laden names). These are the TARP badges, which represent our ‘Totally Accurate Rating Platform’. They allow us to identify specific things, recognise positive or negative aspects of a games design, and generally indulge our consistent silliness with some visual tomfoolery.
