Review: Split Fiction

Review: Split Fiction

Recently, my wife and I bought Split Fiction for the Xbox (yes I know I linked the Steam page, fight me). We were huge fans of It Takes Two, which was made by the same developer (Hazelight Studios), so we had high hopes going into this game.

Let's just say, what a game.

Basic Premise

As with It Takes Two, Split Fiction is another forced co-op title that relies on you and your partner working together to solve all sorts of puzzles and challenges to continue the story. This time, you play as Mio and Zoe, who are both new authors looking to get published for the first time. They are both on their way to what they think is a pitch meeting to try to sell their work, but instead are put into a unique situation where they are entering their own works.

I won't go too much further into this, other than to say the world building in this game is top notch. You can really tell the developers poured their full imaginations into the various worlds that they crafted. As the name implies (as does the cover of the game), you jump between different worlds, some leaning to sci-fi, others in fantasy, and some get.... weird (in the most hilarious ways). We laughed so much while playing this game, but it also was a great experience just figuring out the puzzles.

There was only one puzzle that we felt wasn't quite intuitive throughout the entire game, but everything else was something that can be worked through by putting your heads together and coming to a solution. The game controls are very fluid and the dynamic contexts that appear on screen work well. Sometimes it was difficult to tell the characters apart if the screen zoomed out a lot but they did try to split things by color fairly well.

We played the game on an Xbox Series X console and it ran like a dream in split screen co-op mode. It was very well optimized and the scenery in the various worlds looks amazing. This title would be very easy for someone that doesn't play games a lot to pick up and play too - it doesn't have a crazy, in-your-face interface, the controls are very intuitive, and the styles and interactions within the worlds were well researched and developed.

Nitpicks

I do have a few nitpicks with the game, but most of them don't detract from our enjoyment. At the beginning, we did think that some of the character dialogue was a bit... much. Not that there was a lot of it, but they just didn't really seem all that realistic. The character dynamics smooth out a lot as the game progresses but it was a bit of a rocky start. I also wish there were a couple puzzles that had some alternate solutions. It felt very linear at times, but honestly I feel that's made up for by the game having some very interesting puzzles that are well thought out - they are definitely worthy of the praise they receive.

Honorable Mention: Couch Co-op

One of the great things about this title is that it is definitely built around the couch co-op mindset. The screen seamlessly would shift from full split screen to a blended screen as needed depending on the perspective. This next bit is absolutely a spoiler, so expand if you dare:

Spoiler Near the end of the game, there is a moment where the worlds sort of shift and one player is in a sci-fi world while the other is in a mirrored fantasy world. This was an incredible experience and we were awestruck at how well this worked. It was incredibly trippy but we loved every moment of it.

Final Words

This game took us about 11.5 hours to complete from start to finish. I would rate this as a 4 star title, and would probably bump this up if you like co-op titles (which, you HAVE to play this with someone, you cannot play this game in single player). Some of the character interactions and dialogue in the first hour or so of the game felt a little forced, but like I mentioned, this is smoothed over as you get to know the characters better. A really nice thing about this game though is that only one person has to buy a copy of the game - the friend version is a free download and allows you to play with someone else without both people having to own a copy of it. This is a great way to handle this in my opinion.