I played It Takes Two’s follow-up, Split Fiction, with Josef Fares

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I played It Takes Two’s follow-up, Split Fiction, with Josef Fares

At the 2024 Game Awards, Hazelight revealed Split Fiction, the studio’s follow-up to It Takes Two. The co-op game, which combines sci-fi and fantasy, will once again be published under EA’s Originals Label. It launches on March 6, 2025, for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.

Like Hazelight’s previous games, Split Fiction is a narrative adventure game built exclusively around co-op play. It follows Mio and Zoe (named after director Joseph Fares’ daughters), two aspiring writers who join a publishing company that can bring their writing to life. One is a sci-fi writer, while the other specializes in fantasy, so both worlds come to life in a clash of styles. It’s similar in structure to It Takes Two, but with more spectacular production value and a wealth of surprising side missions. Buying a copy of the game will grant that owner a Friend Pass that will allow one other person to download it as well.

Ahead of its reveal, I sat down with Fares, who took me on an eclectic tour of Split Fiction. The wide demo showcased the game’s genre-hopping co-op action, which once again gives each player completely different abilities to play with in each chapter. It’s an impressive step up from It Takes Two considering its three-and-a-half-year development cycle and ambitious tech. What’s the secret to Hazelight’s success?

“We f**k sh*t up without f**king up,” Fares tells Digital Trends.

A tale of two worlds

Before I can even sit down to get a proper introduction to Split Fiction, the refreshingly filter-less Fares lets his trademark expletives loose. He prepares me for how much my mind is about to be blown and affirms that players are going to love this one. The last time he told me that was in an interview ahead of It Takes Two’s launch. That title went on to win Game of the Year at the 2021 Game Awards. This time, I know not to take his excitement lightly.

After a quick cutscene setting up the premise, we’re both dropped into a sci-fi world where we go through some basic movement tutorials in a split-screen view. What’s immediately apparent is that Split Fiction goes heavier on action than It Takes Two. In addition to some standard jumping, we’re wall-running like we’re in Titanfall and dodging blasts from a far-off spaceship. Movement is quick and precise, building on the strong foundational roots of Hazelight’s last game but turning up the intensity just a bit.

Hazelight

In the full game, each chapter will bounce between the sci-fi world and the fantasy one. Once again building on It Takes Two’s formula, each level includes its own specific abilities for each player. In one, Fares’ character gained a grappling hook that let him swing over to surfaces and pull objects. I had the ability to slash things with a melee hit and phase shift onto walls that had pink surfaces. That leads to a sequence where I’m on the ceiling of a room while Fares is on the floor below me. I slash some pillars to knock them down and create a platforming path for him below. It’s a brain-bending sequence that forces us to coordinate since my left is his right and vice versa.

In another sci-fi level, we’re both placed in control of two drone ******. He can magnetize to surfaces, like Samus’ spider morph ball upgrade in Metroid Prime. My ball can deconstruct into a swarm of nano drones, allowing me to duck under surfaces his ball can’t reach. Later in a fantasy-themed level, I’m able to transform into a giant monkey that can climb vines and smash rocks with one trigger and turn into a swimming otter with the other. Fares’ character morphs into entirely different animals, so we need to work together to get each other through the level.

While that gameplay flow may sound similar to It Takes Two, Hazelight is taking much ******* creative swings this time around. The key difference is that each level contains optional side missions that take five to 10 minutes to complete each. These aren’t just extra platforming challenges you can find off-the-beaten path; each one introduces an entirely new mechanic, and sometimes art style, that’s nowhere else in the main story. It’s a lot of creative energy to put into entirely skippable side content, but Fares believes that speaks to the spirit of the studio.

“There’s a freedom at Hazelight. We’re dogs without leashes; we just go crazy,” Fares says. “We have an idea of what the game is. We have a storyboard and what we want to do. But then we have these sessions where we go wild and do different prototypes and see what we can do. It can be whatever. We say ‘that’s cool, that’s cool, that’s cool,’ and then we fit it into the game.”

Hazelight

Fares tours me through several side missions in our session. In one, we’re both controlling pigs on a farm. When I press the right trigger, my hog farts out rainbows and rockets forward. Another drops us into an SSX-like snowboarding minigame where we compete to see who can rack up the highest score. The most surprising one throws us into a diary page, where we both control 2D pencil doodles and fend off bad guys with nunchucks. Each one I see is entirely unlike the other, making for an entirely unpredictable demo session.

Hazelight even had too many ideas for its own good. Fares tells me that a level was cut just two weeks prior to our session because the team couldn’t get it polished enough. That’s how high the bar is for Hazelight. That quality commitment was apparent in the demo too, which ended with some jaw-dropping technical showcases that players will have to wait to see for themselves. That ambition isn’t coming at a technical cost either, says Fares, who affirms that it will all run at a smooth 60 frames per second at launch.

At the end of it, Fares and I sit down to chat about how the game came together. After It Takes Two, the team immediately got to work on the project after coming up with an idea for Split Fiction’s ending first and working from there. Hazelight’s headcount grew from 60 to 80 in the time between releases. What puzzles Fares, though, is that no other developer tried to do its own version of It Takes Two in the three and a half years Hazelight was toiling away on Split Fiction.

“I’m just surprised considering the numbers we’re doing that not more [games are doing this],” Fares says. “No one was doing it before like we do. You could argue that with a Soulslike game, a lot of people do them and they do pretty well. But I think more people should do games like this, because people want to play it obviously — even if they don’t do it as good as we do, just do it! … I’m not saying that we’re FromSoftware, but we created our own subgenre in a sense.”

Fares sounds sincerely stumped by his own question, eventually asking me why I thought no one else is making a Hazelight-like despite It Takes Two selling 20 million copies. I posit that it might just be a matter of time. With how long game development can be, it can take four years to really see major studios capitalizing on a trend. It’s why we didn’t see big-budget open-world games that looked like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild until 2020’s Immortals: Fenyx Rising. Fares agrees, confident as ever that games like Split Fiction won’t always be exceptions to the rules.

“We aren’t trying to adapt to the market; we create the market,” Fares says.

Split Fiction launches on March 6, 2025, for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.

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