Once every few years, EA publishes a game so great that I forgive them for making the mistake of creating FIFA. This year, we have been blessed with Split Fiction. It’s a game about an unlikely friendship between two writers with entirely different stories to tell. At the beginning of the game, Zoe and Mio are unpublished authors entering a shady lab in a swanky office building for what they believe is their big break. Unfortunately, for them, huge orb machines await them. They suck their brain juices for ideas by pushing them into a virtual reality of their own imagination. Very subtle metaphor for AI, don’t you think?
To make things worse, Mio and Zoe somehow get shoved into the same orb, which fractures it, so the virtual reality shows them bits of both their stories. Split. Fiction. Get it? While Zoe and Mio’s universes are completely different from each other — Zoe, with her fantasy land with dragons, and Mio, with her post-apocalyptic sci-fi hell — they do have one thing in common. Both stories aren’t great, I wouldn’t be jumping to read their books any time soon, and I was mostly unsurprised that they hadn’t been published yet. But they do have incredible amounts of atmospheric detail that lend themselves well to a video game. Zoe’s story allows you to fly a dragon that spits out toxic acid. How cool is that? Mio’s story allows you to do jetpack rides, and shoot at bots, which isn’t new for videogames, but it works well for the type of game that Split Fiction is.
What’s the gameplay like if the settings for both stories are so different? Well, Split Fiction is a spiritual successor to ‘It Takes Two’, the co-operative game that was all the rage with couples back in 2021. It is essentially a two-player coordination puzzle game. There are some combat sequences, but let’s not get into that. There are only a few, which are both spaced out and quite simple, so even if one of you isn’t great at it, you’ll crack the bosses fine.
Combat isn’t important, because you’ll soon realise in Split Fiction that the hardest confrontations are environmental hurdles. There’s a ledge that’s too high to jump to, a door that’s locked by a complicated button system, or a candy cane that raps you on your knees if you don’t move fast enough. All of these unfortunate situations can be overcomeif your partner does the right things at the right time. Deep inside Mio’s subconscious was a huge pinball challenge. The paddles and the balls are controlled by the two players. Feel free to imagine the amount of yelling it takes to complete levels that are just as chaotic.
Like Pinball, there are several iconic games from the entirety of videogame history scattered and hidden in all of the levels. The developers have taken it upon themselves to use these games as inspiration and translate them to Zoe and Mio’s convoluted subconscious. And the fun part is that they’re all sort of identifiable. The Mio sequences with the sci-fi elements had Megaman, Nokia’s old Space Impact game, Sonic, and even Fall Guys! However, the real winner for me was all the Zoe levels. They felt a lot more grounded and warm. There was this hunt for a bunch of lost cats that both I and my cat at home thoroughly enjoyed.
Coming to the specifics, Split Fiction is probably best played if you’re on a local splitscreen with your co-op partner. But playing online works well too — it’s sufficient for just one of you to have bought the game, as it comes with a free friend pass. It also doesn’t really matter if both of you are playing on different devices, once both of you have an EA user account. My friend and I played on the PC and PS5, respectively, and it was breezy with zero hitches. The game is currently available on the PC, PS5, and Xbox.