Split Fiction, the long-awaited It Takes Two follow-up from developer Hazelight Studios, is a very fun couch co-op game in a gaming environment with fewer and fewer of those. The game has creative mechanics that encourage two players to work together and a large variety of settings and types of play, plus it’s relatively easy to pick up for players of many gaming backgrounds. But the game has a glaring problem that consistently takes me out of the fun: The central conflict between the two playable protagonists revolves around a bizarre “jocks vs. nerds”-style dynamic between sci-fi and fantasy writers.

In Split Fiction, a giant publishing company has invited a group of unpublished writers to its offices, promising them an opportunity to get their work published. The writers instead find a high-tech virtual reality setup that they are plugged into, pulling them into the worlds of their own stories. One of the game’s two protagonists, a gloomy and removed sci-fi writer named Mio, is uncomfortable with this and attempts to pull out at the last second, only to fall into the virtual reality of Zoe, a bubbly fantasy writer.

This sets up the central gameplay premise — alternating gameplay between Mio’s dark sci-fi worlds and Zoe’s bright fantasy ones — and the conflict between the two, as they constantly belittle each other’s favored genre and the stories they write within it. In Mio’s worlds, Zoe is constantly badgering her with incredulous comments like “You enjoy this?!” or more direct attacks like “What is wrong with you?” For her part, Mio repeatedly dismisses Zoe’s stories as frivolous, and is more directly rude from the........

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