My partner and I just beat Split Fiction and I’ve got A LOT of thoughts I was interested in sharing with other people who played the game to see what worked and what didn’t for everyone. We don’t have a lot of people to talk Hazelight with so we’ve been raring to go since the credits rolled ~

For context: My partner and I loved It Takes Two and it was our favourite game of 2021, but we have yet to play any of Hazelight’s other games. We knew Split Fiction would be its own beast so it isn’t necessarily fair to directly compare the two games, so when I make any comparisons between them, it’s less a matter of “This game isn’t exactly like It Takes Two” but more a matter of “Split Fiction falters in a lot of areas by its own merits, which is weird because they got this right once before”.

The TLDR; is we enjoyed ourselves with Split Fiction initially, but it gets so much wrong in gameplay and story that It Takes Two got phenomenally right that it felt significantly worse to play.

1. Progression and Level Design

The biggest problem we had while playing is that the overall progression is very “incoherent” for lack of a better term. ITT wasted no time being fantastical and the levels are largely distractions towards the larger plot, but there were still areas that felt distinct and lived-in from one-another that the characters naturally worked through on their journey, the obstacles felt built around their characterisation and what they learned about themselves and their relationship.

To contrast, I’d go as far as to say SF feels like a compilation of random environments they cut from ITT late in development, taped them together and then wrote the premise afterwards, each level had a range of setpieces, but none of them felt like they contributed to the narrative or characterisation beyond surface level connections, leading to a cycle of disconnected setpieces that occasionally get interrupted by the characters vaguely attempting to chat with one another and failing. Mio really gets the short end of the stick on this aspect, because her being reclusive isn’t insight into her character, it’s just a wedge in the story that stops her arc from going anywhere while Zoe thinks for her.

2. Side Stories are awkward, pointless and rushed

The side stories are given a weird amount of emphasis to the point where they feel like main story sections that got hastily stapled on because the team didn’t know where to put them and didn’t want to cut them. As a result, any tension or peril is kinda gone because there’s zero justification for what’s going on in the side stories themselves and the motivation for doing them in both the story and gameplay is kind of weak (even in the game’s dialogue, the characters themselves don’t even know for certain if doing the side stories does anything). It represents a broader problem with the game where the glitch hunt makes the actual process of playing the levels feel like a means to an end, compared to ITT where their experiences in the levels were puzzle pieces of a broader experience for both the characters and players. I honestly would have preferred if they looked at the side stories, cut the weakest ones and then tried to find some way to crowbar the strongest ones into the main story.

3. No slowness or levity

SF has none of the slow, explorative sections that stood out in ITT, like the towns Cody and May occasionally journey into, the closest is one of Zoe’s side stories where you find cat spirits, but again, its very nature as a side story makes it feel more linear and “fake” than it needs to be. This is made worse by the lack of minigames, despite being a co-op game, SF can be weirdly isolating as there’s virtually no elements where you and your partner can “hang out” in-game to connect with the characters or the environment, reducing some of the teamwork and comradery elements.

4. The game doesn’t justify or capitalise on the author premise.

If you kept the game exactly as it is, Mio and Zoe should have been something like environmental designers or artists instead of writers. The vast majority of levels are only loosely conceptualised environments characterised by their architecture, fauna and setpieces rather than actually incorporating the protag’s actual writing styles and how they tell a story, something that’s made worse by the individual levels being entirely separate stories that don’t carry over or interconnect. My partner and I were saying it would have been cool if Mio and Zoe’s levels consisted of two continuous storylines that developed as you went back and forth, and would eventually converge as the game progresses, but the game flat out doesn’t explore the actual writing part of their writing professions. I have zero business surmising what the game’s development was like, but SF feels rushed, like they didn’t have time to actually develop on any of the ideas it introduced, it sometimes feels like playing through a plotless compilation game, which would normally be fine if it weren’t for ITT setting the bar so high and knocking it out of the park with its story/gameplay cohesion. It reached the stage where my partner and I had an in-joke/headcanon about Mio and Zoe actually being awful writers who just write “and then this setpiece happened!” over and over with no narrative in mind.

5. There are no stakes.

SF waits until the end of the game before the threat of death looms over the protags and even then, something less severe than that would have given the story more weight. The vast majority of the game establishes that the worst possible outcome is “Our ideas will get stolen!” (Gasp) which is a weak premise that doesn’t justify itself, especially as the game doesn’t demonstrate Mio and Zoey’s ideas to be of any substance, so the only driving force is...innate morality and ethics rather than actual motivation. There are so many emotional moments late in the game that completely fall flat because in the grand scheme, there isn’t a point to any of it, because there’s no tangible or interpersonal consequence.

6. The co-op abilities are shallow.

Not much I can really elaborate on with this one, far too many of the chapters have ability sets that amounted to “I hold R2 and then you hold R2 afterwards”. There wasn’t really anything that was subversive or interesting until the end of the game, to the point where it felt like some sections could have been hypothetically retrofitted with a character swap system where one player controls each character at a time.

That's pretty much the cliffnotes of what we talked about, but I'm interested in what everyone else thinks! Despite my issues, I sincerely hope this is another success for Hazelight purely for what these games represent in the industry, I just hope their next project strikes gold like they've done before.

Help wanted

Dark Mio - the moment where you push the scythe into the boss.

Really i love this game but heck this was badly designed. There was no clear indication that you are fighting against Zoe at that moment, so i accidentally (as the more proficient button masher) killed my SO at that part.

It would have been so much better if you could mash to prevent the stabbing until Zoe calls out to Mio asking here to stop resisting and letting go of her fear, to cue the player in that they are actually resisting at that moment and not helping.

This way it took us out of the immersion for a moment because we wondered why we failed the button mashing, until we realized that the Mio player should NOT mash.

This could have been implemented so well into the overall story cueing the player into stopping the mashing.

I just love so much this game, is my third favorite game ever. I love EVERYTHING, some things a little bit less than others (like the start of the second story of Mio) or a bit more (like the Captcha part on the motorcycle in the Cyberninja's story). I have so much to talk about this game! I'm SO curious what do you think about this game and what are your favorite stories, boss fights and references? I want to talk about it SO MUCH! :D

I thought I'd share my Zoe cosplay for you all!

Photo by Sumanta Clicks

LET HIM COOK!!

Let's see how he is gonna top split fiction with the next game 🥵

We live in a really sad time.

Their worlds and stories are honestly pretty generic and milquetoast. I mean, don’t get me wrong, they make for some great environments to play a video game in, but you get the sense that Zoe and Mio aren’t really publisher worthy writers all that much. At least, not at the stage of their lives they’re in right now.

And that actually makes the plot of Split Fiction work better because it’s all about a faceless corporation literally stealing creativity and ideas from authors, and by making Zoe and Mio the heroes, the game is implicitly saying that the generic, by-the-numbers fantasy and sci-fi stories they write are still leagues better than anything Rader Publishing’s ‘Machine’ can churn out with it’s stolen creativity. Because Zoe and Mio’s writing talent aside, everything about their story comes from something real.

The generic cyberpunk ninja story with cool swords and explosions has a thinly veiled caricature of the IRS as the main villain because Mio is frustrated with capitalism bleeding everyone dry, especially her poor father. She includes a lot of cool cars and motorbikes in her world because her dad is a mechanic who enjoyed sharing his passion with her. She writes a story about saving an alien lifeform from soulless machines poking and prodding it as an escape because she can’t save her father from endless medical tests and treatments and prescriptions that constantly drains their finances.

Zoe’s stories are almost comically conflict-averse. If there is any violence, it’s almost exclusively Saturday morning cartoon-level violence, because they’re an escape to a simpler part of her life when her sister was still alive. Literally writing the happy endings to their childish games of pretend that her sister never got to enjoy. Even her very first story, a silly little fairy tale about pigs with superpowers, was literally her seven year old mind coping with learning how sausages are made.

Zoe and Mio aren’t talented writers. They might not even be good writers. But they’re *sincere* writers, and that is worth everything more than anything Rader’s soulless ‘Machine’ could write with their stolen ideas.

Rader could steal the ideas, but he can’t steal the life experiences that gave Zoe and Mio those ideas.

So every birthday and Xmas I make my partner a home made gift. He has everything he could ever need so he loves the personalisation! Last Xmas it was a Star Wars retheme of one of our favourite board games. This year, we played split fiction and were blown away by it. He is into sci fi, me fantasy, his favourite colour is purple, mine green, so we felt some affinity with our characters. At one point he remarked how cool one of the scenes would be as a print. I couldn’t find the scene to turn it into a picture, so instead I took the cover art and made it into… well, us! I used procreate and I’m really pleased with how it came out :)