“Split Fiction will go down as one of the most beloved co-op games of this generation,” said Christopher Byrd in The New York Times. A split-screen adventure in which you and a friend play as aspiring writers whose sci-fi and fantasy ideas are coming to life in real time, the Hazelight Studios release delivers so many dazzling spectacles that you happily overlook the predictability of its overarching storyline.
Across eight chapters, players hopscotch among settings that present rising stakes, and while a friend and I were amazed by the final level, an earlier chance to pilot a two-headed insect through various platforming challenges was “an experience unlike any we had encountered before.” Like It Takes Two, Hazelight’s previous hit, Split Fiction demands that players work in tandem, said Ash Parrish in The Verge. At the same time, it’s “forgiving enough that players at different skill levels (say, parent and child) can still play together.” When my husband and I navigated a pinball level with him controlling the ball and me the paddles, “our minds and bodies melded together” and “it was honestly kinda sexy.”
