Hello, 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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?)
I stand by it. You would never call an oak a “leaf tree”.
I believe it’s written ‘leaftree’ actually.
