Playing It Takes Two with a buddy is a true test of your relationship. If you lag behind frightfully or your partner does, it can be a source of resentment. That’s why I began sweating once I realized my game demo of the upcoming and just announced EA Original Split Fiction involved me having to jump on the couch with the game developer himself Josef Fares.
“It’s intimidating playing with the game developer, huh?” He asks cheekily, as we use Xbox controllers to nudge our characters forward.
“I just don’t want you to have to wait on me,” I say, while managing the double jump, dash, and then right bumper to grapple hook across an otherwise unreachable platform in a cyberpunk metropolis. “Phew.”
At times encouraging, and other times boisterous and confident, Fares presents his new game to me — a couch co-op, split screen just like It Takes Two, but instead of being about family and divorce, it’s about friendship.
Two girls, Mia and Zoe (named after Fares’ daughters) are aspiring writers who dream of science fiction and fantasy. Mia, who’s a city slicker, and Zoe, who grew up around farm animals, have each written elaborate tales, only to be surprised when they’re sucked into the very sci-fi and fantastical worlds they once imagined. (Fares says the two girls aren’t based on his daughters, who are still toddlers; he just wanted their names in the game.)
The gameplay involves jumping between fantasy and sci-fi, as the two girls get used to each other and their vastly different genres and backgrounds. They must play through the stories they’ve written to survive. Each player controls one girl, and the two characters have varying play styles and attributes. Mia writes sci-fi and belongs to that world, while Zoe is more of a fantasy gal.
Split Fiction throws a lot at you fast — from transforming into playable pigs, to dragons, to shape-shifting drones and fantasy creatures. There’s a big twist at the end that I’m also obligated not to talk about for fear of spoiling players before they’ve even started.
“At Hazelight, we like to say that we f*ck sh*t up without f*cking up,” Fares says, “We’re like wild dogs.”
Still, it’s not easy to attempt a game that dabbles in multiple genres, from a section where you can swing a sword, to parts where you take flight as a dragon.
“We have so many different mechanics. The problem is not coming up with them,” Fares says, “The problem is to polish them. In a sense, our players get a little bit spoiled. Because once you play something, you expect it to play like other games.”
If the combat of Split Fiction paled in comparison to other sword-wielding games, fans would notice. But Fares emphasizes that another studio would have three to four years to polish a sword mechanic, while Hazelight simply doesn’t have that kind of time. Split Fiction has been in development for more than three years.
“Obviously, we can’t work on that sword mechanic for three years, because we’re not a combat game,” Fares says. “So that’s our challenge. That’s the biggest chance to take ... Some of the mechanics we have to throw away. In the beginning, we were like, we won’t be able to do this right.”
The choices that the Hazelight team have kept in the game preview are both excitingly new and comfortingly familiar. As I raced to keep up with Fares, while my character sank underwater to the obliviousness of nearby piranha, I could feel my skills from practicing It Takes Two thankfully carry over, so I wasn’t starting from scratch. But I couldn’t anticipate the strange fart patterns of the pig I could transform into, I could hardly grapple with a sci-fi level that sent gravity spinning, and I found plenty of other oddball situations that made me marvel. Of course, that’s what makes Split Fiction such an intriguing entry coming early next year.
