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Hazelight Studios’ upcoming adventure Split Fiction does more than add a genre-blending twist to the cooperative action of It Takes Two. A newly released trailer shows that the follow-up to Josef Fares’ wildly successful third-person platformer isn’t a strictly linear affair. According to Fares, who provides the trailer’s voiceover, players will be able to embark upon “side-stories” that are “completely different from the main adventure” as they explore the game’s dual sci-fi and fantasy worlds.
“Side stories are found in the main levels and look like a portal,” Fares explains. “Once you enter, you end up in a new world.” The trailer then provides several examples of side-adventures players might encounter. Starting with a brief glimpse of an Arabian Nights-inspired desert strewn with golden palaces, the trailer cuts to protagonists Mio and Zoe floating around a wrecked space-station. Then it shows another desert set-piece where the two ride a creature called a “sandfish”, before wrapping up the segment with the two waterskiing across a crystalline ocean as they chase a futuristic hovertrain.
Although we only see snapshots of these side stories, they seem to have a 3D Mario quality to them, designed to take a specific concept and iterate upon it rapidly, before moving onto the next idea. This isn’t the only area where Split Fiction apparently borrows from the more recent adventures of Nintendo’s plumber either, with Zoe’s fantasy worlds enabling the pair to shapeshift into different creatures. These include a fairy, a big burly ape, and an aquatic lizard thing that you don’t get a proper look at. There’s some perspective shifting going on too, with several clips of the game playing from a 2D, side-scrolling point of view.
It’s a flashy showing for Hazelight’s latest, and emphasising its variety as a platformer is a smart move after everyone fell in love with the similarly Mario-inspired Astro Bot for the same reason last year. Whether it’ll be as beloved or successful as It Takes Two remains to be seen, though everything they’ve shown so far suggests it’ll be closer in quality to It Takes Two than the studio’s earlier experiment in cooperative gaming, A Way Out.
EA will no doubt be hoping for a smash hit from Hazelight, given other events beneath the corporation’s umbrella. The publisher recently revised its financial outlook down following the underperformance of EA Sports FC 25 and Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Regarding the latter, EA has now ceased supporting The Veilguard with updates, and seems to have laid off much of its team under the guise of restructuring for a single Mass Effect project.
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Kurt Indovina
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