I Played 3 Hours Of Split Fiction And I'm Convinced This Is A New Benchmark For Co-Op

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honestly blew me away. I was excited going into this hands-on preview session, but my expectations were tempered by the sheer ambition of this game. Was this going to be gimmicky or a new standard of cooperative play? It's no secret that co-op is a dying style of play in the industry. It was once expected for a story-based game to have some form of co-op included, but that started to dwindle in the past decade.

Then, we have Hazelight — the studio that made and Game of the Year winner — carrying the torch for co-op in the world of gaming, having made a name for themselves with the aforementioned two titles. And now they're working on a brand-new game that aims to reshape those two previous releases almost as stepping stones, thrusting players into seemingly dozens of ideas or stories (or levels) that can't be considered anything but ambitious. Again, my concern was Hazelight becoming Icarus here, but that doesn't seem to be the actual case.

As shown in trailers so far, follows two characters — authors — named Mio and Zoe. The game begins with both of them arriving at Rader Publishing, looking to get a publishing deal for one of their stories, but they couldn't be any different from each other. Mio is a skeptical, pessimistic, closed-off individual whose stories are almost always focused on science fiction, whereas Zoe is a trusting, bubbly, open individual whose stories are almost always focused on fantasy — and they each dislike the other person's chosen literary genre.

Split Fiction Continues Hazelight’s Legacy Of Revolutionizing Co-op Games

Once they go through an orientation at Rader Publishing, the company's founder, James Rader, appears and introduces all the prospective authors to a machine of his own design that creates a simulation for them to explore. The simulation is something akin to The Matrix in which the participants are thrust into new worlds, sometimes with abilities or powers. But the true purpose of the simulation isn't for the authors to