Nic Reuben
Brendan: Hello, Nic.
Nic: Brendy! Why are you here, in my review? What is this, some kind of Split Fiction? Some kind of co-op adventure by Hazelight? Fine, since you’re here: what’s the best bit of Split Fiction, Brendy?
Brendan: We were escaping sci-fi gunships on the back of a stolen motorcycle. You must have felt cool steering us between missiles and gunfire. I could see none of that. I was too focused on clicking the “accept” box on a Terms and Conditions screen. Our ill-gotten bike’s futuristic security had kicked in, you see, and it was my job to disable its self-destruct protocol by phone. You were driving fast and jumping between skyscrapers while I was wrestling with captcha after captcha to stop us from exploding. I laughed the whole time.
Nic: My favourite bit involved pigs. You were a pig that could fly by farting and I was a pig that could transform into a tall Slinky. Then we fell through a meat grinder and popped out as sausages. Then we had to grill and mustard ourselves as a final act of sick humiliation before wriggling into some buns and getting eaten by a giant child.
Brendan: I didn’t like that bit. Although it did make me hungry. Let me explain the basic set-up before we get deeper into it. Two unpublished writers meet at a big shady company’s experimental brain scanning session. But, oh no, the terse and introverted sci-fi writer has fallen into the brain-bubble of the outgoing and friendly fantasy writer. Each player takes control of a writer, with the ensuing puzzles, exploration, battles, and boss fights all requiring a bit of back and forth chat as you play to get through. If you’ve played the studio’s previous game, It Takes Two, you probably know what to expect.
Nic: Brendy, you’ve successfully pulled the context lever on your side of the screen, leaving me free to enter the detail hallway. Great job! If only your cold sci-fi heart would embrace fantasy then appreciate me as a writer and person, we might have a touching if trite odd couple story on our hands! What a good idea for a videogame.
Brendan: It’s “video game”. Two words.
Nic: Anyway. I think you said you the pig party was “too much whimsy” for you. There were also two whimsical pigs grilling a third whimsical pig on a whimsical spit. But those almost Amanita-style bits stood out for me because much of the game felt traditional and restrained. I crave novelty in all things, but what you’re getting here is a series of mostly predictable setpieces, each a metaphor for Large Emotions.
Brendan: Yeah, the big idea is that the fantastical and futuristic stories you’re playing through reflect some deeper trauma or problem our heroes face in real life. Mio’s troubles bleed into her cyberpunk debt story. Zoe’s childhood memories are a constant source of fantasy twee.
Nic: The best of these set pieces give both players a different toolset and have you work together to overcome obstacles. My Ape had to stomp down flowers to clear a path for your fairy to fly through. Your cool, acid spitting, flying dragon had to melt some metal so my lame woodlouse rolling dragon could bump into the door. But a big chunk of the game just felt like a simple 3D platformer, albeit one where you’d sometimes have to stop and do nothing for a bit while your mate finished their alternative route and kicked down a ladder. Only sometimes instead of ladder you’re getting hurled across rooftops inside a portaloo.
Brendan: I think it’s a very simple game, in that you could blaze through it over a few nights with your partner or housemate, and you’d have a few laughs and nothing about your life will change but maybe that’s fine. I do not think it is a game for either of us – Warhammer McFadden and Tekken O’Hara. But I did laugh a surprising amount at the slapstick nature of many deaths. And the respawning is so forgiving, it felt about as consequential as dropping a single piece of popcorn in the cinema.
Nic: The simplicity is a good thing in theory, to keep the momentum up, but I don’t feel that simplicity needed to be expressed through so many sections that felt indistinct and interchangeable. I compared it to eating a bag of Revels – chocolate bits where you don’t know what flavour they are. The joy of Revels is discovering whether you’ve got toffee or raisin or nuclear waste or whatever when you bite into them. It’s all downhill from there because none of them are actually that tasty. Split Fiction is fun when it introduces a new, novel concept – less so when you have to laboriously chew on that idea for ten minutes before getting to the next.
Brendan: It is definitely a novelty parade. Not only are you visiting different sci-fi and fantasy stories that Zoe and Mio have banked in their imagination (not to mention the many side stories we skipped), you’re also catapulted into distinct genres of game with alarming frequency. Look, you’re in a R-type style shmup now. No wait, a family-friendly platformer with pigs. Scratch that, now you’ve gotta blast through a multi-phase Metroid-style boss encounter. It plays with gravity-shifting, and the portals of, uh Portal. There’s a rhythm dance section with a culturally indeterminate disco monkey (he refers to you as “homey” and “habibi” in the space of two minutes). It is sometimes a very traditional third-person shooter. You once remarked there’s a definite God Of War 2 flavour to some bosses.
Nic: Repeatedly mashing a button to punch a large creature in the eye will always remind me of God Of War, yeah. There are also many sections where you swing between grapple points while things collapse around you.
Brendan: On top of this, it is full of watery references to other games and media. Easter eggs for scenes in Lord Of The Rings, Zelda’s Deku tree, the barrel blasting of Donkey Kong Country. It’s a very accessible please-as-many-dweebs-as-possible game.
Nic: Ah, The Deku tree. This was a big old-faced oak in one of Zoe’s stories. I can’t remember her name for it, but I remember Mio saying it was a “strange name for a leaf tree”. Then we spent ten minutes trying to discover if we were the idiots for not knowing what a “leaf tree” was or why someone would put those words in that order and then record them.
Brendan: Ah yes, a leaf tree. Like a fur cat. Or a rock stone. The uninspired dialogue is specifically painful to us as real writers, and the characters are poor portraits of the career. Hazelight have the get-out clause of being able to say that “these gals are diegetically bad writers” whenever something in the story is a bit crap. But the frame story is also somewhat rote, and if you’re going to make your writers poor at their craft, then why not make them canonically awful? Why not Garth Marenghi them or something? But Mio and Zoe are simply by-the-numbers scribes trapped in a by-the-numbers story (inside another by-the-numbers story).
Nic: There are definite Alan Wake by way of Mr. Men morality vibes to the whole thing. Also, I in no way co-sign Brendy’s assertion that I am a “real writer”. But yes, I think we spent a while trying to second guess the game’s intentions: Are they supposed to be bad writers? Is that part of the joke? Is it actually clever when the main villain claims he’s a good dude, and then the writers say “oh, come on, the bad guy always says he’s a good guy, what a cliche!”. Obviously if you’re going to go traipsing around a magical forest you need to learn how to forage for herbs, but maybe go easy on the deadly lampshade.
Story aside, I liked the bits where it was clearly taking a breather to let you screw each other in various ways. Or have a deathmatch. The parts where it winked at you: “We’re presenting this as a trust exercise but it’s actually so you can let your mate’s head bounce off the carpet and cackle about it”.
Brendan: This is another reason I like that games such as this exist, even if I’m not really into them. There was a chapter when you played as a big magical tree and suddenly had control over the whole forest environment. You could retract spikes and extend platforms. While I, as a big ape, had to navigate the hazards and carnivorous flowers of your sacred woods. It’s full of these moments in which the two players can have a playful dig at one another, with no real tension of messing up.
Anyway, I think we’ve dissected this quite a lot now. I got the feeling you were growing tired of our misadventures at a faster rate than I was. And that disparity is never a good thing when it comes to couch co-op games like this. But we both came to the agreement that, eh, it’s not our bag.
Nic: Despite my gripes, I can’t see anyone playing this with a mate or partner and coming away feeling they’d wasted the weekend. That’s as long as you’re both up for it in the first place – I doubt it’s going to convince anyone who isn’t already into Hazelight’s schtick. And it’s not like I’d say “this is a wonderful videogame and you’ll miss out if you don’t rope someone in to play it with you”. It’s a joy facilitator, rather than a joy generator. A fun bridge, not a fun spout. (Remember when you said I was a real writer?)
Brendan: I stand by it. You would never call an oak a “leaf tree”.
Nic: I believe it’s written ‘leaftree’ actually.
This review is based on a review build provided by the publisher.
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