Split Fiction, the new game from It Takes Two developer Hazelight Studios, doesn’t do anything particularly new. The game is a straightforward co-op adventure that strings together disparate sci-fi and fantasy games like links on a chain. If you bundled together the sci-fi and fantasy sections as separate entities, they wouldn’t form a cohesive experience in either gameplay or story. And the overarching narrative that connects them all is a pretty heavy-handed (though necessary, in today’s climate) parable about the rapaciousness of generative AI tools and the creative bankruptcy of the executives that develop them.
Nevertheless, there’s an ironic genius in Split Fiction precisely because it takes so many little gameplay elements that I’ve seen and done before and executes them with a brilliance and polish I have not.
In Split Fiction, you and a partner play as Zoe and Mio, two people who have come to the curiously named Rader Corporation under the auspices of getting their stories published. But — gasp! — instead of getting paid, they get trapped in a machine designed to extract people’s creative ideas. After mishaps and shenanigans, Zoe and Mio are forced to w …
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