2025 Preview: Hazelight’s next co-op epic, Split Fiction, has four big shoes to fill

3 days ago 38

There’s no such thing as a sure thing in video games, but if we were forced at gunpoint to pick a critical success in 2025, we’d go for Split Fiction.

After cutting his teeth in game design by directing the wonderful Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons for Starbreeze, Josef Fares formed his own studio, Hazelight, with the aim being to work exclusively on two-player co-op games.

The studio’s first offering A Way Out was generally well received, but it struck gold with 2021 release It Takes Two, a co-op adventure that has achieved levels of success it’s fair to say nobody expected, not even Fares.

Back in October, it was announced that, not counting its appearance in game subscription services like EA Play, It Takes Two had sold 20 million copies, putting it just a few million shy of games like Grand Theft Auto 4 and Monster Hunter World.

While much of these sales were presumably down to the game’s enormous success in China – Fares said a while back that about half of its sales were coming from China, partly thanks to it being awarded Game of the Year by popular video-sharing site Bilibili – many studios would dream of hitting a fraction of that figure, especially for a game that doesn’t allow solo play and therefore blocks off another potentially lucrative source of sales.

Cultural commerce considerations are one thing but the main reason It Takes Two did well is because, simply put, it’s a fantastic game. Bilibili in China wasn’t the only outlet to give it a Game of the Year – it picked up the same accolade at The Game Awards and the D.I.C.E. Awards, leading to word of mouth and continued success in the West, too.

It’s crystal clear, then, that Hazelight has a large audience eagerly awaiting its next offering, and now that we’ve had our first look at it we’d be stunned if it didn’t get the job done again.

Split Fiction may have a similar two-player co-op interface to its predecessor, but putting them side-by-side shows a huge leap in detail. The game swaps out the dolls from It Takes Two for detailed human characters, its debut trailer showing a much wider range of emotion in the faces of its protagonists.

It Takes Two was credited for continually introducing new ideas throughout its duration, and Split Fiction’s plot is tailor-made for similar creativity. When authors Mio and Zoe find themselves trapped in each other’s stories, they have to work together to escape. The twist is, Mio is a sci-fi writer while Zoe writes fantasy stories, meaning players will be taking on dragons one minute and drones the next.

The setting isn’t the only thing that will be constantly changing – Fares has also confirmed that, as in It Takes Two, the game will continue to introduce entirely new play mechanics to players all the way up to the final level.

“It Takes Two was credited for continually introducing new ideas throughout its duration, and Split Fiction’s plot is tailor-made for similar creativity.”

“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,” the game’s description reads. To this, we reply, “Yes, please.”

The only thing we aren’t quite sure about yet is whether Split Fiction will hit the same emotional heartstrings It Takes Two aimed for. Hazelight’s previous game had divorce as one of its central mechanics, and while some argued that its protagonists weren’t the most endearing and that the ending may not have been entirely satisfying – not that it always is in actual divorce, of course – the premise did lead to some heartfelt moments.

So far, we haven’t learned enough about our two new protagonists to find out how Hazelight is going to make us relate to them beyond the obvious fish-out-of-water situation they find themselves in. You’d better believe we – and maybe up to 20 million others – are happily waiting to find out, however.