Given the fact that my wife and I love playing great co-op games together, I’m particularly attuned to any games in that vein that have come to Switch. Our most common and reliable options have generally been the LEGO titles, but there have been some other notable releases including Blanc and the excellent It Takes Two that have been stand-outs as well. In the case of Split Fiction, given the fact that it was made by the same team behind It Takes Two, our expectations were quite high. I’m thrilled to confirm that Split Fiction has managed not to just match the high level of design of its predecessor, it has pretty well laid the groundwork that all action-oriented co-op games will be judged by in the future.

In the game you’ll play as Zoe and Mio, two amateur writers who are drawn together by an accident in a lab and end up exploring quite a wide range of worlds and scenarios built from their imaginations. Given the fact that one loves fantasy, and the other is a huge sci-fi fan, the seed for all sorts of creative world building is planted right away, and the players will get to enjoy the fruits of that core premise throughout. In particular if you choose to chase down and play through every one of the game’s side stories, the ride you’ll be taken on ranges from thrilling, to hilariously weird, to confoundingly challenging to both your minds and reflexes, but almost constantly with a smile on your face. 

So much of the gameplay is similar to It Takes Two at its core, but by making the premise take place in the imaginations of two creative people, rather than being tied down to the real world, the variety in the game’s set pieces and key moments is both shocking and wonderful. There are simply things that happen that I’m gushing to tell people about, because they gave my wife and I such joy, but the surprise and “WTF am I looking at?” of it all are really what helps to make the experience special, so you’d be best off knowing as little as possible about what happens to get the most out of the game. Since there’s support for local split-screen, local play between devices, and even online support, all requiring just a single copy of the game, there are also plenty of ways to enjoy the experience together. Given the need to coordinate a bit in many parts of the game, I’d consider a minimum of voice chat to be essential to your success, but that isn’t to say that two people in tune with each other couldn’t pull it off.

About the only warning I’d provide is that this can be a taxing game at times, both in terms of a need for reasonable controller dexterity, and an ability to work through clues to solve the game’s many different puzzles. Thankfully, many end up being variations on a common set of powers or abilities you’ll have in any given phase, and most of the time you’re brought up to speed on them before things get hairy, but that isn’t to say it’s always handled perfectly. Similarly, we did hit an occasional glitch of some kind, usually related to some sort of clipping, but thankfully the option to start again from the last checkpoint never lost us more than a few minutes so in the end that didn’t end up being much of a gripe. While I wouldn’t make any claim that there’s no further that co-op action adventures can go beyond this, the more I’ve thought over the scoring for it, the more it seems to be more than deserving of a 10. There’s simply nothing else out there with the same degree of heart, creativity, polish, and variety of Split Fiction. If you have a friend or significant other who’s up for the challenge, it absolutely shouldn’t let you down.