Josef Fares and Hazelight Studios aren't normal, and I'm not just talking about the energetic charisma that makes Fares a highlight whenever he's given a mic at The Game Awards. No one does it quite like the Swedish studio: Its games have online support but are designed around split-screen co-op—arguably a relic of videogames past—and are stuffed beyond belief with one-off systems, environments, and minigames, some of which only last minutes.
The studio's next co-op adventure is Split Fiction: Fares just revealed it at The Game Awards, and earlier this week he showed me around a dozen of its levels. I leapt between flying cars, transformed into an otter, became a pig who farts rainbows (when I walked into mud, I was given the option to "wallow"), rolled through a level as a Samus morph ball, competed with Fares to perform downhill hoverboard tricks, got turned into a notebook drawing, piloted a sandworm, and rode a dragon—and that's just the stuff I can talk about.
