Three thumbs up for Split Fiction
Hazelight’s new co-op game is a winner in my household, even if it’s weirdly age-inappropriate at times.
Spit Fiction, a game that briefly let my eight-year olds play as hot dogs, isn’t the perfect game for them.
There’s some blood and fighting, some cursing. They’re young for this T-rated co-op adventure that is mostly fine for kids—until the rare moments it is not.
During one sequence in Split Fiction, the two lead characters are deposited into a fantasy world and have to jump across the tops of poles held by ogres. When one of the ogres’ arms was lopped off by a guillotine and spurted blood, my daughter declared: “I just think of ketchup or jelly when I see that.”
It was a bit much, but I let them proceed.
The kind of gaming content I worry more about exposing my kids to is bad gameplay, and the reason I’ve let them play well past the ogre ketchup is because the gameplay in Split Fiction is very good.
Split Fiction is development studio Hazelight’s third co-op game. There was the two-man prison break A Way Out, and there was It Takes Two, a game about a squabbling married couple forced to survive in a fantasy world. This new one is about sci-fi writer Mio and fantasy writer Zoe, both unpublished, both trapped in the worlds they’ve written, needing to team up to finish each story and find an escape.
Many years ago, a young game designer shook his head when he talked to me about the cutscenes in Halo 2, and how they’d forced players to merely watch the game’s coolest moments, including a dramatic airdrop from space.
Twenty-one years later, Split Fiction is a pleasing parade of the most exciting parts in a conceivable sci-fi or fantasy adventure, all made playable. The gameplay changes by the minute, from chases to jumping sequence, from shootouts to high-speed flights. You’re on motorcycles. You’re riding sand-sharks. You’re scrambling across the roofs of train cars. You’re turning into a fairy while your pal turns into a monkey so you can defeat a giant cat.
The stuff of Halo 2 cutscenes is now fully interactive. You play through a high-altitude drop that sends your character diving from the upper altitudes, past exploding sci-fi airships, to the surface.
Best of all, you do all this wild stuff with another player. In fact, you can’t do any of it alone. It’s all engineered to require cooperation.
For example, when Hazelight sets part of a level amid sci-fi highways full of flying cars and trucks, my kids controlling Mio and Zoe didn't just have to hop from one airborne auto to another. Mio’s view of the world was turned sideways. She stood on the side of a flying truck. Zoe had to move a crane toward her so Mio could toss a grappling hook at it and swing—sideways—to the next vehicle.
It’s best to just watch the clip of my kids playing this sequence (and take note of where Mio, the one in pink, is in each half of the screen)
The whole game is like this…. Set piece after set piece. I think we’re halfway through the game and the sci-fi levels are mostly more interesting than the fantasy ones, though the latter batch does include the game’s best co-op twist.
If there’s a miss, it’s that there’s little that’s bookish about the whole affair. The game is about struggling writers who talk of manuscripts and I assumed wanted to be novelists. But their work comes off more like the creations of would-be Hollywood action movie directors, and all that they’ve written has the bombast of story written with a special effects team in mind.
It tracks that the specter of movies hangs over the game. Hazelight’s perpetually quotable lead creator, Josef Fares, is famous for yelling “Fuck the Oscars,” not “Fuck the Booker prize.”
In the game, Mio and Zoe occasionally discuss how stories are not always about what they seem. Sometimes you write fiction about overzealous policing because you’re mad about a parking ticket, the game shows. It’s not that deep, but deep enough to help my kids grasp the concept.
During the writing of this, my kids were home early from school and asked to play more Split Fiction. Not without me, I urged. I’ve enjoyed watching it. They’ve enjoyed playing it. It’s a two-player game, and it’s going down well with three.
Item 2: Making music to Helldive to
Backstage at the DICE summit in Las Vegas (yep, I still have interviews from that event to share with you), I briefly chatted with composer Wilbert Roget II, after Helldivers II won Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Composition thanks to his work on the game.
Roget wasn’t holding the trophy. He was holding his notebook and opened it to show me the Helldivers II main theme. He told me how he came up with the defining track for the hit sci-fi war game (listen to it before/as you read this):
“Basically, one of the first things I saw was that drop-down, where you're in the hellpods and they're crashing onto the planet. I almost envisioned like a cinematic, and this was like a score for that. And then, as soon as they come down, they impact with the ground. They're now like six feet under.
So that's the descending part of the theme, and then they rise up, which in my opinion is actually more important, because now you're going to the [pounds the table twice] - dun dun- and now it’s more heroic.
And that's literally how I did it. It's sort of like a kinetic scoring style and it sort of grew out of that.
A bonus exchange on the topic, as the lead game director of Helldivers II chimed in with what I playfully confirmed was praise:
Johan Pilestedt, chief creative officer, Arrowhead: Helldivers II is actually the first game where I've never turned off the music while developing. Every other game, Magicka…. I couldn't listen to the Magicka music.
Me [laughing]: I mean, is that a compliment to him, or is it an insult to the rest of your composers?
Pilestedt: I think it's a compliment to Will. It's like, I can't get enough of the theme. It's so good.
Item 3: In brief
🃏 LocalThunk, developer of last year’s brilliant card strategy game Balatro, has published the three-year timeline of how the game came to be. It’s a must-read.
Excerpt (emphasis in the original): “May 2022: It is during this burst of productivity that I first start thinking about a possible Steam release of the game. This was the first time in my then 8 years of game development that I had even considered publicly releasing a game I had made. Normally they just end up going to a couple of friends, but honestly the main purpose of my games wasn’t for them to be consumed, but rather for them just to be made.”
🎮 Discord, the chatroom/communication platform of choice for many in the gaming community, is considering going public and meeting with bankers to explore their options, The New York Times reports.
💗 A mod that adds health bars to Monster Hunter Wilds’ monsters in the game’s PC version has been downloaded 80,000 times in the week since the game launched, Polygon reports.
Item 4: The week ahead
Sunday, March 9
All-women’s speedrunning festival Frost Fatales kicks off, running throughout the week and leading up to a one-handed run of difficult platformer Celeste on Saturday, March 15. [Full schedule]
Tuesday, March 11
Wanderstop (PC, PlayStation), a new game about tea shops and life choices, with development led by Davey Wreden, the creator of the Stanley Parable, is released
Wednesday, March 12
Expelled (PC, Switch, iOS), a game about solving a crime in a boarding school, from Inkle, the studio behind the seafaring murder mystery Overboard, is released.
Thursday, March 13
Dungeons of Hinterberg, a game about taking a vacation and that includes Zelda-quality dungeon design, gets a PlayStation port. That game was one of the best I played in 2024,
Friday, March 14
WWE 2K25 (PC, PlayStation, Xbox, including last-gen) is released.
Item 5: A legendary Zelda commercial
Growing up in the 1980s, I saw this absurd Zelda commercial on TV when it first aired. The way the man in the ad screams “Leevers!” is burned into my memory.
Turns out this isn’t exactly the Zelda commercial that an ad firm pitched Nintendo. That’s according to the Video Game History Foundation’s recent podcast (via 80.lv) with former Nintendo of America marketer Gail Tilden. She describes the creation of the commercial as follows:
“He’s screaming. He says, ‘Ahh, peahats!’ And so at the time, since I was still working in the advertising department, I think at that time, maybe– again, we were once again, only with three or four people.
“And when the agency pitched that there would be a stand-up comedian doing something about all the fun things in this game, we all said yes. So then I go to this shoot in Los Angeles, and it’s this crazy guy in a padded cell, and I’m like, This, I can’t go through this, because this is not what we agreed to. This is not what we were expecting. We thought a guy standing at a mic in a spotlight.
“And so we called the agency, we called back and to the executives, and they said to go ahead, maybe because we were there already, but very quickly after that, we did another Zelda commercial, so you’ll have to look at the two knowing in that order and what happened, and that one is called, is called Zelda Rap, and I really don’t think that probably neither of them is very appealing.”
Seeing that Split Fiction is getting a LOT of love all around, appreciate the perspective of your in-house review staff on it. Also, love the dive into history about that Zelda commercial. Wild!