“Did We Actually Do That?”: Josef Fares Explains How Split Fiction Pushes the Co-Op Adventure Genre Further Than Ever

Of course, this is a huge amount of work. Split Fiction feels as though it’s introducing new mechanics every 15 minutes, and jettisoning the old ones – but it can’t allow each new idea to feel half-baked.

“In Split Fiction, [there’s a section where you ride] dragons – just one of those dragons took, I think, eight months to create. And in the beginning of my career, a lot of the team members were like, ‘Why are we doing all this and you’re only playing it for like 10 minutes?’

“But here’s the thing. [In a] movie, if you have a great scene that cost a lot of money, you don’t reuse that scene because it cost a lot of money. I do feel sometimes that cool moments like that wouldn’t have been as cool if we just reused them all the time. There is [an idea] in video games that, just because something was very expensive, it needs to be reused. But why? Why do you have to reuse it? Because that takes away the actual feeling of when you first experienced it.”

Split Fiction takes that philosophy to its natural endpoint by including huge sections of totally optional content. It Takes Two included some mini-games along the way, but these sections (accessed through portals you’ll find along the way) go so much further.

“Here, it’s actually full-blown worlds with new mechanics, sometimes bosses, new visual worlds. It’s literally almost like a new game inside the game.”