Split Fiction’s latest trailer shows off its side-stories, which let you fly through space and ride giant desert fish in worlds ‘completely different’ from the main adventure

Hazelight Studios’ upcoming adventure Split Fiction does more than add a genre-blending twist to the cooperative action of It Takes Two. A newly released trailer shows that the follow-up to Josef Fares’ wildly successful third-person platformer isn’t a strictly linear affair. According to Fares, who provides the trailer’s voiceover, players will be able to embark upon “side-stories” that are “completely different from the main adventure” as they explore the game’s dual sci-fi and fantasy worlds.

“Side stories are found in the main levels and look like a portal,” Fares explains. “Once you enter, you end up in a new world.” The trailer then provides several examples of side-adventures players might encounter. Starting with a brief glimpse of an Arabian Nights-inspired desert strewn with golden palaces, the trailer cuts to protagonists Mio and Zoe floating around a wrecked space-station. Then it shows another desert set-piece where the two ride a creature called a “sandfish”, before wrapping up the segment with the two waterskiing across a crystalline ocean as they chase a futuristic hovertrain.