Split Fiction’s invented sci-fi-vs.-fantasy rivalry gets in the way of a fun co-op adventure

Split Fiction, the long-awaited It Takes Two follow-up from developer Hazelight Studios, is a very fun couch co-op game in a gaming environment with fewer and fewer of those. The game has creative mechanics that encourage two players to work together and a large variety of settings and types of play, plus it’s relatively easy to pick up for players of many gaming backgrounds. But the game has a glaring problem that consistently takes me out of the fun: The central conflict between the two playable protagonists revolves around a bizarre “jocks vs. nerds”-style dynamic between sci-fi and fantasy writers.

In Split Fiction, a giant publishing company has invited a group of unpublished writers to its offices, promising them an opportunity to get their work published. The writers instead find a high-tech virtual reality setup that they are plugged into, pulling them into the worlds of their own stories. One of the game’s two protagonists, a gloomy and removed sci-fi writer named Mio, is uncomfortable with this and attempts to pull out at the last second, only to fall into the virtual reality of Zoe, a bubbly fantasy writer.

This sets up the central gameplay premise — alternating gameplay between Mio’s dark sci-fi worlds and Zoe’s bright fantasy ones — and the conflict between the two, as they constantly belittle each other’s favored genre and the stories they write within it. In Mio’s worlds, Zoe is constantly badgering her with incredulous comments like “You enjoy this?!” or more direct attacks like “What is wrong with you?” For her part, Mio repeatedly dismisses Zoe’s stories as frivolous, and is more directly rude from the start, refusing to engage in conversation about their interests or backgrounds.

There are differences between science fiction and fantasy, and some of them are significant! But to suggest there’s an unbridgeable gap between those two genres and the people who enjoy them feels extremely outdated, to put it kindly. Many popular writers in each genre write in the other, and pretty much everyone I know who likes one of those genres also enjoys the other. (Heck, our annual list of the best books of the year compiles both sci-fi and fantasy because of the crossover appeal between the genres.) People might have a preference, sure, but that’s not what’s happening in Split Fiction; the game makes it seem like sci-fi writers think fantasy isn’t a form of legitimate artistic expression, and vice versa. It’s hard to imagine any fan of either genre today being that hardline about the other.

The setup would make a lot more sense with a different pairing: a sci-fi writer and a traditional romance writer, or a fiction writer and a nonfiction writer (feel free to daydream with me about ancient Rome or Egypt levels), or a genre writer and a Serious Dramatic Fiction writer. Then the conflicts that Split Fiction is attempting to wade into — “serious” art versus frivolous art, or the value of violence in fiction — could actually have some ground to stand on. Instead, Zoe’s character comes off as holier-than-thou about genre fiction when she herself writes escapist fantasy stories. 

Many of Zoe and Mio’s critiques about each other’s work tend to apply to their own as well. Zoe is constantly criticizing Mio for how violent her stories are, but the most violent moment I’ve seen in Split Fiction is from one of Zoe’s stories, when trolls are attacking a village and one of them claps his hands and turns an unlucky villager into a cloud of blood. Violence seems to be a particular sticking point for Zoe, but fantasy is also a historically violent genre (something Mio never brings up, as far as I’ve seen). 

The intention of Split Fiction’s character conflict is clearly to have them bridge those gaps over the course of the game, but it’s very hard to buy into their rivalry in the first place. There are plenty of opportunities for conflict between these two characters, who are very different people (the “city girl vs. country girl” note also comes up a lot), but Split Fiction instead chooses to focus their conflict through the bizarre loci of their chosen genres.

The game’s writing issues don’t stop at the confounding central conflict or repetitive bickering between people who both ostensibly love speculative genre fiction. Both Mio and Zoe are supposed to write books, but it feels like no one involved is aware of what a book is. Most of their “ideas” we play through in Split Fiction are simply a series of settings or minigames, or surface-level pastiches of existing popular properties — “there’s a bad toxin!” or “sand planet” or “collect the scattered ghost cats!” Plenty of those scenarios and minigames are fun, but these worlds lack any of the details real-life writers would likely bring to them — for example, as far as I can tell, no character is named in any of these fictional worlds. No other people seem to exist within the stories. The places are not named. Many of these choices make sense for a minigame-filled video game (and some of Split Fiction’s writing problems would be solved if they were games writers, instead), but it’s odd to then hang the whole thing within a book-writing setup. Zoe and Mio are both depicted as underexperienced writers who have never been published, which could make their underbaked stories work, but the game doesn’t lean far enough into this for it to feel like the intention.

Most confoundingly, Zoe seemingly introduces Mio (a grown-up, adult writer) to the concept that writers tend to put something of themselves into their work. It is beyond any notion of believability that a writer would not have considered this before, especially one serious enough about their craft that they are actively pursuing publishing deals.

I had similar issues with It Takes Two, a game that came highly recommended to me (despite our very negative review). While some of the mechanics were interesting, I found the writing irritating, and bounced off quickly. Split Fiction not being about divorce makes it considerably more palatable, and thankfully, the game is still quite fun to play. The couch co-op mechanics are inventive and varied, and require coordination and quick thinking. The checkpoint system is forgiving and prevents too much frustration at failing one particular task, and the game is at its best when evoking bursts of creativity: an early level where you play as magical pigs from one of Zoe’s childhood stories, or a brilliant level where you play within a sketchbook as the author writes and erases ideas in real time, representing the at times indecisive creative process. Split Fiction does a fantastic job communicating new puzzles to you, often without any words at all. If only the rest of the game took a similar approach to its writing. Instead, it posits some eternal conflict between genres more alike than they are different, suggesting dark, depressed people write sci-fi, while bubbly, happy people write fantasy.