Split Fiction, a new co-op adventure – announced last year with a rather cryptic tweet – from the creators of the 2021 Game of the Year It Takes Two, Hazelight Studios, has finally hit the shelves, breaking several records in its first weekend in terms of player numbers and overall reception from the gaming community.
Hazelight
Showing the best start out of all Hazelight titles, Split Fiction reached 259,000 concurrent players on Steam at its peak – far surpassing It Takes Two with 71,000 and A Way Out with 8,500.
While SteamDB player charts always serve purely as representatives and don’t exactly indicate how many copies each game has sold altogether, this is especially true for Split Fiction, given that split-screen games tend to be more popular on consoles than on PCs. With that in mind, it’s reasonable to assume that the game’s player numbers on PlayStation 5 are even higher than the impressive 259,000 it hit on Steam. In a recent interview with The Washington Post, Game Director Josef Fares stated that It Takes Two has sold 23 million copies since its launch, making it interesting to see whether SF can replicate its predecessor’s success.
In terms of the gaming community’s reception, Hazelight’s latest masterpiece hasn’t fared any worse, reaching a whopping 98% positive score on Steam and a commendable 9.4/10 on PC and 8.6/10 on PS5 on Metacritic. As noted by Fares in Fall Damage’s “reacting to comments” video, he’d love for Split Fiction to bring home a second Game of the Year trophy for the studio. However, with GTA 6 also slated to launch in 2025, he believes competing with it would be “tough.”
With its impressive performance, Split Fiction has also joined the ranks of the most successful Unreal Engine 5-powered games released in recent times, joining titles like Black Myth: Wukong and Marvel Rivals.
Shortly before the game’s release, the Game Director spoke with Epic Games about the team’s approach to handling UE5, discussing the development of custom tools, the integration of a scripting language – Unreal Engine Angelscript – into the source code, customization of Sequencer to support split screen and seamless transitions from gameplay to cutscenes, and more. You can read the full interview here.
And what are your thoughts on Split Fiction? Have you tried it? Do you like the game so far? Tell us in the comments!
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