I thoroughly enjoyed It Takes Two. Playing it with my partner was a memorable experience in our relationship and so it became one of my favorite games. So the announcement of Split Fiction, especially with its themes of scifi and fantasy, genres we both love, was really exciting. Shortly after its release, my partner bought a copy for us to play, and off we went on our fantastical adventure! But it didn't take long for us to feel this game couldn't hold a candle to its predecessor, both in characters, plot, and game design.

The main characters are two up-and-coming authors. One who specializes in scifi and is antisocial while the other specializes in fantasy and is social. Throughout the game, their personalities and genres clash. There is a lot of potential here that was so mishandled. There could've been some real interesting conversations about the condescension that authors/readers have for other genres, tropes and problems within those genres, and the writing industry as a whole.

Instead what we get is Fantasy Girl taken aback over and over about how shocking scifi is, and I found it hard to suspend my disbelief that an author would be so sheltered from the scifi genre that content such as car chases, moody futuristic cities, and violent robots would be so mind-boggling. Scifi Girl had slightly more believable commentary but it was the same repeated "this is so childish" message over and over. Most of these characters for most of the game made me feel nothing but cringe with their reactions and story beats. The antagonist of this story was also just incredibly corny. I won't even bother talking about him since he's such a backseat character anyway. I think there were only a couple scenes that made me feel some emotion for these characters and their struggles.

The levels themselves played fine but I found the settings and lack of interesting designs monotonous. There are several gameplay mixup moments that kept things from becoming boring but I felt there were so many homages and genre exploration that were missed here.

Everything in this game feels "safe". It feels like a pre-teen CW TV show. A lukewarm experience that I had some mild fun with but overall was forgettable. I'd only recommend this one if it was on sale for like $20.

There is so much to Split Fiction. So many mechanics and switch ups, so many unique ways that the game utilizes the 2-player co-op that requires just enough teamwork to keep both players engaging with one another. There's nothing superfluous, its all game. It makes you realize just how shallow most other modern games are by comparison, in terms of scope of mechanics. It reminds you that the biggest and 'best' games that come out now are a handful of mechanics stretched out to 10-30 hours. Meanwhile Split Fiction gives you 3 new mechanics every hour, completely switching everything up, and managing to take those sets of mechanics to their full potential within the hour or two that you play with them before making another switch.

Not only is it mechanically rich in terms of variety and depth, but it is also impressive in terms of what it manages to accomplish as you get deeper and deeper into the game. These aren't just shallow versions of whatever the game is mimicing at the time. The devs have managed to push the boundaries at times, especially as you get closer to the end of the game and the action is ramping up, the split screen begins to do some truly insane things that are worth seeing and can rival even the most famous gaming action cresendos.

The only thing that keeps SF from a perfect review (and its still a masterpiece IMO, that is going to stay in the GOTY conversation all year long) is that the story behind those mechanics is pretty soft. I take that back somewhat, it's actually mostly the writing. The story is fine, its certainly on the nose in that its just a metaphor (or is it a simile?) for A.I. stealing art, but its a functional and motivating plot. The writing is more of the same writing that has been plaguing the industry. It's the same writing that has its hooks in Veilguard. It's that sort Whedonist writing that has been plaguing every medium for a decade now. It's both melodramatic and quippy and it ends up making everything seem like something on CW.

That said, this is a must play. If you can get one of your friends on board you won't have a better time this year. Because that's what SF is all about. Cutting the fat off of the gaming experience and just focusing on being fun in the moment-to-moment playtime. As a bonus, you only need to buy one copy among the two of you, since the other person can use the "Friend's Pass" to play as the second player for free.

I might be alone in this, but I didn't love Split Fiction. It definitely improved upon It Takes Two, but it also lapsed into the former's cliches a few too many times. Way too many slide sections; unclear way finding (especially in grappling sections); action sequences that give you almost no time to react, thus making it a frustrating exercise in repetition until one player drags the other dead player along by default; over-padded boss fights that ultimately give you very little agency, prescribing when and how you can actually fight; and, it's just a little too long and repetitive.

Otherwise, the graphics are beautiful. The music is forgettable. The characters are fun, although also like It Takes Two, one of them is very unlikable for a large majority of the game. The story is fine, a little rushed (despite the play through feeling too long, which is quite an accomplishment), also predictable at times (I figured out what was up with Zoe's sister the minute she started talking about her), but they pulled it together for a really satisfying and touching ending.

Where the game truly shines is in the very last segments, when the worlds and mechanics mash up. This feels reminiscent of WarioWare, Rhythm Heaven, maybe even Undertale, in the best of ways. I wish more of the experience could have been like that because it was VERY cool.

The coolest part of the whole thing though, was easily this:

😊

Wow, this game is really something else. The technical wizardry here cannot be understated. As Josef Fares has said numerous times now, doing a split screen game means you need to render the two separate screens at once, so the fact they were able to do that with how much they had going on in the game and without me experiencing a single hiccup, frame-drop, crash or anything, is insane.

This game is stunning to look at. Every level, or side mission, feels unique and fully realized. Breathtaking vistas, epic boss battles, high speed chases, challenging platforming sections and a touching tale of love, loss, grief, friendship, creativity and imagination at the heart of it all.

I played through this with my fiancee and it was tough at times, I won't lie. She's no experienced gamer by any means but we made it through without cheating or cutting corners, just pure, raw trial and error. It took us a few weeks but we got there. Sure, there was some bickering, but the moments of pure silence as we sat in awe or the worlds or completely enthralled by the story, mixed with the moments of overzealous celebration after taking down a boss we'd been tackling for an extended period of time, greatly outweighed the frustrations.

This game not only met, but surpassed my every expectation. I will say, and this is a pretty common complaint, that it takes a bit to warm up to the lead characters. They feel really generic at the start but as the story unfolds and we dive deeper into their worlds, they really grow on you and the ending will have you overjoyed.

Like the title says, brilliant, bold and beautiful. My fiancee and I both loved it. What an experience, what an idea, what a game!

Do you know how difficult it is for a game to win me over with its gameplay alone?

I'm a heavily story- and character-oriented gamer, and I'll happily favour a game with a fantastic plot and likeable characters but mediocre gameplay over the inverse any day. Split Fiction's story is very surface-level - its characters are cliche and not all that deep, a lot of it had me eye-rolling at the predictability, and the dialogue was so obvious and well-trodden that at one point I found myself making a game out of the fact that I could almost always guess exactly what someone was going to say next.

But this is the first game in years where I've loved the gameplay so much that I wanted twenty more hours of that alone. It's varied, it's almost always exciting, it's fast-paced, it's surprising and refreshing and new. I'd seen everyone hyping up the end sequence in reviews I read beforehand, so I was waiting for that the whole game, and at first I was a little underwhelmed - but the longer it goes, the more jaw-dropping and just plain cool it gets, and it genuinely has to be played to be believed.

I'm a fantasy guy, so I figured I'd like Zoe's worlds more, but I actually ended up really enjoying Mio's. The sci-fi stuff isn't something I lean towards consuming in my fiction, though it creeps in sometimes, but I found the speed and mechanics of those sections were more fun for me than the slower fantastical ones.

Others have praised the story and underlying message for its significance in a currently generative AI-ridden world where corporations and people are utilising machines to stifle and mimic human creativity, but I hesitate to treat this as intentional when, if I recall correctly, the lead director has since stated he isn't particularly against AI. It's a shame if that's true, and it taints the message most take from it quite a bit to me.

A personal niggle I had as a writer myself is the fact that it's always been a pet peeve of mine when people speak as though writers always put a piece of themselves into their stories and characters. I pride myself on being able to create all kinds of characters, including those absolutely nothing like me and personalities I'd never be able to relate to, and every so often I get someone nudging me and going, "Okay, but they're like you a little, right? You wouldn't have created them if you weren't inserting yourself just a bit, right? Every character is a reflection of yourself in some way, right?" No! I create characters to explore writing about things and people outside of my real life, not to just put aspects of myself in there. This game is very heavy on "every story is connected to your life and problems in some way", with the characters (especially Zoe) often sort of giving each other that "oh, c'mon, it must be about your life, how's it connected?" ribbing and it always being true. That's a very personal and niche complaint, though, and I don't know how other writers feel about this, so it might resonate with them much more than it did me!

It's a little trickier than It Takes Two - my fiancee struggled a little more and got frustrated occasionally, but it didn't hamper her overall enjoyment at all and she was right there with me when we finished wishing we had more of it to experience. I plan on replaying it with a friend who's less of a gamer than my fiancee is, so I'll see how it pans out for someone with minimal experience.