Drop Split Fiction onto the map of 2025 and it stands out as a rare specimen: a critical darling, a commercial smash, and very nearly impossible to replace.
A commercial miracle that should not exist
It launched straight to 91 on both Metacritic and OpenCritic, a Mighty rating, the 99th percentile of everything scored — opening even higher than It Takes Two, which was already Game of the Year for 2021. But the number worth dwelling on is the sales. A premium, buy-once game with co-op only, no solo mode, no PvP, no live-service tail, moved over a million copies in two days, two million in a week, and seven million by April 2026 — the 19th best-selling game in the US for 2025.
That borders on counterintuitive. In an era obsessed with service games and long-tail retention, Hazelight sold those numbers with a roughly twelve-hour title you are required to play with someone else, proving that "forced co-op plus high creative density plus a free invite for a friend" genuinely works. It pulled four TGA 2025 nominations — Best Game Direction, Best Action/Adventure, Best Family Game, Best Multiplayer — and made six longlists at the 2026 BAFTAs; even a film adaptation is in the works, directed by Jon M. Chu and starring Sydney Sweeney under Amazon MGM. The cultural reach of this original IP has already spilled well past the medium.
Who should buy it, who should walk away
So who is it for? The answer is clean: anyone with a steady partner who is willing to spend a dozen-plus hours communicating and coordinating. If you and a partner, roommate or friend are after something to share that will not go stale halfway through, this is close to the best option going right now — the half-hour reinvention rhythm keeps two mismatched skill levels both having a good time.
Flip it, and two groups should walk straight past. First, anyone who only wants to play solo; the game offers no path for a single player, not even an AI fill-in. Second, anyone temporarily short a partner — the Friend's Pass spares you the cost of a second copy, but it cannot spare you the social cost of going out and finding someone willing to talk and coordinate. The barrier here was never money; it is whether there is a person beside you willing to sync up for a dozen hours. One more heads-up: crossplay runs through EA's account system, so connecting can occasionally be fiddly — go in expecting that.
Its deepest moat
Back to the line that matters. The hardest thing to copy about Split Fiction is not a mechanic or a set piece; it is that it built "you are required" into a core you cannot pry apart. You can find dragon-riding, split-screen shooting and gravity flips elsewhere. You will not find a second co-op adventure willing to bet everything and hold the line that losing one player means the game ceases to exist.
Its most direct rival is its own predecessor, It Takes Two, and it wins on wilder genre range, denser mechanics, louder spectacle, and a higher opening reception. Other studios cannot follow not because the tech is beyond them but because none will stake every resource on a premise guaranteed to turn away every solo player — that takes a kind of nerve. For the foreseeable future, on this narrow forced-co-op road, the only studio likely to top Hazelight is Hazelight. My verdict is 8.5: near-flawless in play, dependable in story and sound, and its real value sits in none of the individual scores but in one simple, rare fact — it needs you, and it needs the person beside you. Games this confident in a single, unfashionable idea do not come along often, and the ones that do tend to age into the titles people still talk about a decade later. If you happen to have that person within reach, do not miss it.
