Hazelight unveils Josef Fares’ Split Fiction co-op buddy adventure that blends sci-fi and fantasy

Electronic Arts and Hazelight Studios revealed Split Fiction, an action-adventure game that pushes the boundaries of the co-op genre further than ever.

Developed by Hazelight Studios, the imaginative minds behind the 2021 Game of the Year winner with more than 20 million units sold worldwide, It Takes Two, comes a unique co-op action-adventure split screen game where players will jump between sci-fi and fantasy worlds. I think it looks amazing.

The game is about two writers, Mio and Zoe, with one writing a sci-fi story and the other writing a fantasy story. They are thrown into a simulation that keeps shifting them back and forth between the two worlds. Players will play as either character, with the split screen showing a sci-fi world on one side and a fantasy world on the other at various times during the game.

With a wide range of ever-changing abilities, players will take on the roles of Mio and Zoe (named after Fares’ children, who were in the audience) as they work together to take back their creative legacies and discover the power of an unexpected friendship.

“At Hazelight, we’ve been building co-op games for 10 years, and with every game we push beyond what
players expect for action-adventure co-op games. I’m so proud of what we have built with Split Fiction. Let me tell you guys, it’s going to blow your mind,” said Fares, Founder of Hazelight Studios. “Because Mio and Zoe jump back and forth between sci-fi and fantasy worlds we’ve been able to do some really wild things with gameplay and storytelling. This is definitely our most epic co-op adventure yet.”

Fares showed me the game behind closed doors and I quizzed him about it. He said the team has been working on the game for 3.5 years, starting just after the completion of It Takes Two, which was a two-player co-op split-screen game. He said the team has become comfortable with making such games and is pleased that virtually no one else is making the kinds of titles anymore.

“They meet this new tech company that can simulate their stories to life. They are amateur writers that get their hope to get their stories published. But once they get there, shit goes a bit sideways, and they get stuck in the same simulation. And they’re total strangers,” Fares told me. “They don’t know each other. It’s kind of a buddy movie (story), you could say. It’s about two total strangers that end up in the same simulation. But the thing is, one of them writes sci-fi, while the other one writes fantasy. So you’re going to be jumping between a fantasy level and a sci-fi level and you play their own written stories.”

In Split Fiction, players will discover a variety of sci-fi and fantasy mechanics and abilities. Escape a sun
that’s going supernova, challenge a monkey to a dance battle, try out some cool hoverboard tricks, fight
an evil kitty and ride everything from gravity bikes to a sandshark. With worlds that are entirely different
from each other, surprising challenges await players at every turn.

Mio and Zoe are contrasting writers, one of sci-fi and the other of fantasy, who become trapped in their
own stories after being hooked up to a machine designed to steal their creative ideas. Jumping back and
forth between worlds, they’ll have to work together and master a variety of abilities in order to break free with their memories intact. They glitch back and forth into each other’s worlds, as there is something wrong with the publisher’s simulation. Much of the dynamic between Mio and Zoe is tense, not unlike the fighting between the husband and wife characters in It Takes Two.

“Friendships and great memories are made through playing amazing co-op games together – and no one
does it better than Hazelight,” said Jeff Gamon, general manager of EA Partners, in a statement. “We’re excited to continue our long-term partnership with Josef and his talented team to bring another innovative, collaborative adventure to life; one that continues to push the boundaries and redefine what players can experience together on and off the screen.”

A Hazelight Studios staple feature, Friend’s Pass, which allows one player who owns the game to invite a
friend to play for free, is back and pushed even further with crossplay options enabled for PlayStation,
Xbox and PC via Steam.

Split Fiction releases on March 6, 2025 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC via Steam, Epic
Games Store and EA app for $49.99.

Creators of the Game of the Year 2021, It Takes Two, Hazelight is a multiple award-winning independent
game development studio based in Stockholm, Sweden. Founded in 2014 by Fares, film director
and creator of the critically acclaimed game Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. Hazelight is committed to
pushing the creative boundaries of what is possible in games. In 2018, Hazelight released A Way Out, the
first-ever co-op-only third-person action-adventure, as part of the EA Originals program.

My interview with Fares

Asked why he teamed up with EA Originals again, Fares said it has worked out very well so far, as EA has a broad reach.

“If it’s isn’t broke, don’t fix it,” he said.

In the tutorial, I was able to learn fast. In my demo of the game, I saw that much of the interactivity was color coded. If there was a purple RB lettering, that was meant for Mio and so I had to hit my right bumper on my controller to use my grappling hook to fly through a space quickly. If it was green, it was meant for the other player, Fares in this case, to use his controller to get Zoe to do something. You could run on the walls like in Titanfall, and you could jump on a rail and slide like in It Takes Two.

What was extraordinary was the performance at 60 frames per second. Though the game is split screen, it wasn’t slow. In split screen games, the rendering can be choppy because two different scenes have to be rendered at the same time. But in this case, the game moved fast — that’s important as it’s an action game. You do things like mash buttons or switch tracks to avoid a disaster. You can also shift from one world to another across the dividing line of the screen to avoid disaster in your own world.

Fares said that the team has become adept at making co-op and split-screen games, and they were able to make the more challenging task of keeping the performance high while weighing that against how good everything looked. And to me, the graphics were quite lush, as both worlds are beautiful.

It’s cute as well. There are many side quests and there’s one where the writers are turned into pigs. One moves forward on fart power. Their capabilities are always quite different and that makes them have to work together to solve problems in the world, even if they annoy each other. In one part, Zoe had to distract some sandworms that wanted to eat anyone in the sand while Mio had to sprint across a stretch of sand. I turned into a big gorilla for the sci-fi world and transformed myself into a big fish in some parts to progress through the landscape. When you switch between worlds, your clothing changes to fit the theme.

There’s an “unfinished” level for one of the writers that becomes a place where you can surf on the sand like in the old SSX snowboarding games. During the whole time I played the demo for the first time, I was largely able to keep up with Fares, who had played it many times. That speaks to the intuitiveness of the gameplay.

Hazelight managed to this by growing from only 60 people on It Takes Two to around 80 people on Split Fiction.

Asked how Fares’ team came up with the zany ideas for the game, he said, “At Hazelight, we fuck shit up without fucking up.”

The game will be likely around 15 hours to play, and it is built in Unreal Engine 5.

As for doing other kinds of games, Fares said he was not attracted to any of the hyped trends in gaming, like blockchain, metaverse, AI and live services.

“Fuck that. That’s not my thing. No way,” he said.