Split Fiction review (Hazelight Studios, 2025, PC, PS5, Xbox Series)
The last hour or so of puzzle-platformer Split Fiction — where the two-player split-screen format, and the game’s basic premise feel like they work as one — is its best. That hour’s presentation of the nth rendition of certain platforming sequences is interesting in ways largely absent from the previous twelve. This hour is still filled with things that make Split Fiction a game I have no desire to return to soon — ropey English accents that use North American dialect, a pantomime villain I can’t endorse even as an over-the-top caricature, and a wearying amount of tonal shifts, as its writers, Josef Fares and Sebastian Antonios Johansson, work to tell an earnest trauma story while also packing it with puns and whimsy, and in doing so fail at both — but, it was still the best hour, and good and interactive enough that I’m here writing about it.
I would have liked it if the rest of the game was as consistently creative and engaging. Before then, the person I was playing with and me both largely saw the game as a novelty. We still came away thinking that a bit — the story it tells is, despite the flurry of genre-bending imagery, dry, and there are too many mechanics that you use once for ten minutes and then rarely if ever encounter again for it to feel more than a series of setpieces — but we at least saw the game’s potential, that it fleetingly showed it could reach. To quote my play partner: “this bit is much more interesting than the other bits” “it’s not the worst game I’ve ever played”, “there are worse games that pelt you with mechanics”. To quote, well, me: “They should have been doing this twelve hours ago.”
Split Fiction is the third game by Hazelight Studios to take a co-op only approach. I’ve played all of them with the same person, and the stories and voice acting have never been anything to take seriously. The draw has always been that, with the right play partner, they come alive as figures of fun. Ridicule the scenery chewing villain! Play a tonally inappropriate minigame at the storyline nips at your heels, and laugh and laugh! Poke swiss cheese holes in the game world’s internal logic! The value of a Hazelight game is in its ability to forge fun memories that are great fun to recall years after the playthrough.
Split Fiction has enough of these moments for me to say that it was a nice activity to pass the time with a person in my life and that I had a good time. Here, minus the final hour, the prevailing highlight was a moment during an otherwise underwhelming on-rails sequence, where we both gasped and laughed and swore at the screen — “are they doing THAT?!” — and, yes, they were. It was maybe two minutes of immediate mirth at some gameplay mechanic absurdity, but we were calling back to it throughout the playthrough, and had great fun — so, here, with Split Fiction, Hazelight succeeded, as it does generally for us, at making a fun video game — if not a good one.
Split Fiction is a silly, ridiculous, sometimes even painful time of it, which is why I can’t recommend it at all. But — I can say I enjoyed it. it’s at once absolutely not worth spending twelve hours to get an hour and two minutes of fun back — that’s a terrible ratio, and it’s not moving in the slightest, or intentionally funny. But — you can laugh at it, and occasionally, one of the many superfluous, fleeting mechanics might not make you groan as you recognise the specific video game it’s ‘doing’, but could instead make for a ten minute sequence that could stick in your mind days and weeks and years after you play through it, creating truly human moments worth clinging to.
Split Fiction is not a good video game, but so long as you have a willing other, or beleaguered child, of the right disposition to poke it with a stick, you might have a good time.
