I had no plans to play Split Fiction, but then it got suggested as our January VGHVI game, and my offspring was in town for the end of Christmas, so we went through it.

Honestly, at the beginning I was super not impressed. The plot and characters were cartoonish, and not in a good way: everything was done with the broadest possible strokes, none of the characters felt remotely realistic, and they also weren’t archetypal in any interesting way. The game play was fun enough, though, and it’s always good doing things with a family member, so we keept on going.

For a while, that’s the level that it stayed at. Pleasant enough platforming; easy, but that helps make the game accessible for more pairs of people, so I didn’t mind that. And I really did appreciate how forgiving the game was of failure: as long as one of you was still alive, the person who just died would respawn in a few seconds; and even if you both died, it’s very generous with checkpointing. I actually can’t think of another game that checkpointed in the middle of boss battles the way Split Fiction did, but I thought that was great.

 

The game is broken up into chapters, each of which is based on a story that one of the two in-game characters wrote. So you’d alternate between science fiction chapters (from Mio) and fantasy chapters (from Zoe). That all led to a bunch of eye rolling from a story point of view, but it actually worked rather well from a gameplay point of view: it gave an excuse to change up character abilities noticeably every hour or two in the game. Not so much as to make the game feel completely unfamiliar — a couple of core traversal abilities lasted through the whole game — but each player would always have a special ability, and that got changed up.

But Split Fiction mixes things up more than that. Quite early on, the game introduces tiny “Side Stories”; the conceit here is that these are little sketches that were never fleshed out into full stories (and which are often presented as something the in-game characters came up with when they were much younger), but also these frequently feel dramatically different both from setting and in terms of gameplay. The first one that really had us take notice was Farm Life – you’re playing as pigs, one of whom flies by farting and one of whom has a spring jump. Great change of pace tonally; and then, well, watch the end of that video and you’ll see that it gets weirder (in a good way).

This is what’s impressive about Split Fiction: it’s a design playground, diving into mechanics and settings, spending time with them until you feel like you’ve got a good amount out of them, and then moving on to something new. And it does this not just with ideas that have legs: the game is quite happy to spend five minutes on an idea that has five minutes of juice, and to then move on to something else.

 

Once we realized that, we were happy to make it through the whole game. And the game did actually get a little deeper as it went on: the game play was noticeably harder after the first couple of chapters, and while the story never actually got good, it at least got a little less shallow as it moved on? (I appreciated how the game portrayed Mio as being honestly pretty messed up socially but making progress on that with Zoe’s help.)

So: a pleasant ten hours or so. I’m not sure how much of that was because of the game and how much was because I was playing it with my kid, but I was glad to have spent that time. And I do think the game is genuinely interesting as a design playground, and other games could learn from its generosity.

The writing / story really was amazingly bad at the beginning, though…

Post Revisions: