My mum taught me how to play video games in the early 2000s. For as long as I can remember, I was playing through levels of Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon, and passing off the controller when it got too hard, or I couldn’t figure out a particular challenge. Playing Split Fiction together with my mum in co-op, the tables had suddenly turned – and with each new level, I found myself slipping further and further back into the past.
In Split Fiction, you and another player (whether in online or local co-op) embody Zoe and Mio, two young writers (strangers to each other) who are approached by a mysterious company with a too-good-to-true offer: finally, their most creative works will be published. Only, they have to step into a terrifying machine first – one that puts them in a magical sci-fi stasis bubble.
Zoe goes willingly, but Mio is reluctant, and her suspicion eventually leads to her being trapped inside a bubble with Zoe, both of their ideas mashing together into a wild and often strange adventure through unique, bizarre worlds. The overarching story here, like It Takes Two before it, is all about overcoming differences, and learning to work together to overcome overwhelming odds.
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A few hours into the game, after a sharp introduction to the primary plot, and to Zoe and Mio (who are, at first, fairly unlikeable, but grow considerably over the course of their adventures), my mum made a comment I initially found quite funny.
“This is just like Crash Bandicoot,” she said. Someone who’d largely spent their gaming career on Crash, Spyro, MediEvil, and Ape Escape would relate Split Fiction to games they were already familiar with.
But as I was playing through the Neon Revenge plot, and the game asked me to jump from platform to platform, over various floating obstacles, and when I slipped into a stream and had to avoid obstacles floating down a tube, I realised she had a point. Perhaps platformers haven’t really changed so much in the last twenty years.
This fact, my mum found delightful – because it meant even in its shiny newness, its rapid pace, its twisting puzzles, there was so much familiar about Split Fiction. Playing with my mum was a lot like being shot into the past, and realising it’s not so very different from today. We might’ve been sitting on different couches, in a different home, in a different era, but there was nostalgia and familiarity in each new platforming challenge, and in needing to swap and change controllers when the going got tough.
A throwback platformer in disguise
Split Fiction is a more complex game than its platforming predecessors, but flashy scenery and more complex mechanics can’t disguise its roots, or just how approachable it really is for newer or less experienced players. (Or those jumping into modern gaming after several years away.)
Over the last week, my mum and I have been making bite-sized inroads into Split Fiction, and every level we’ve encountered has revealed some new delight. Even when I found the story slipped too quickly into the strange and discombobulating – there’s a lightly traumatic level where you’re pigs, and then sausages on a grill – it was the excellent and satisfying platforming that kept us coming back for more. It became a nice break from the everyday, and most importantly, its neat level of challenge allowed us to work on those deeper communication skills.
Split Fiction is incredibly clever in the way it lays out its puzzles, presenting you with nuggets of information and hints on how to proceed, then leaving you with your partner to work out exactly how to progress. In the Neon Revenge plot, one player is given an electric whip that can drag and pull up objects. The other player has a sword, and can leap from one gravity to the next.
One particular puzzle sees Mio running along a neon path, and encountering an electric field that blocks her way. Meanwhile, Zoe is waiting on another layer of gravity, with the ability to pick up special poles. It took some debating, back and forth, but the solution was this: Mio must wait for Zoe to fire poles into the ground where the electric field is. Carefully, Mio must jump along these poles, waiting for Zoe to throw more poles to extend her path.
In practice, this puzzle is magic – and in fact, most puzzles in Split Fiction are. They boggle the mind in their clever design. The teamwork required also enhances your journey, making genuine engagement, discussion, and sharp thinking necessary to reach your next goal.
It feels like a game specifically tailored towards local co-op gameplay in particular, with plenty of value in the option to stop, sit back, analyse your surrounds, reckon with your latest abilities (they differ throughout each of Zoe and Mio’s shared tales), chat it through, and then move ahead with renewed vigour. There’s plenty of room for players to find their own way forward, and take pride in figuring out solutions together.
In the end, it’s for this reason that Split Fiction succeeds.
I’m not particularly enamoured by the game’s main story yet, and I do think Mio and Zoe’s friction is occasionally more grating than dynamic. Some segments are also far weirder and more off-putting than funny. But with innovative gameplay, and some of the most layered, unique puzzles in video games, defined by player agency, Split Fiction more than makes up for its narrative quirks.
There is genuine magic in this game, and in how it pushes the platformer genre forward. At its best, it is completely transportive, and strengthens bonds between players in real life, as much as the bonds between Mio and Zoe are strengthened over time.
It’s also a strangely wonderful throwback to a past era of platforming, where teamwork sometimes meant handing the controller over to a parent, or an older sibling, or a friend. I haven’t quite finished my journey through Split Fiction just yet, but the feeling of elation and satisfaction if gives me makes me so, so excited for more. It’s also so wonderful to see my mum engaging with video games once again, and finding real joy in a modern adventure that feels approachable and inviting, even as the difficulty ramps.
A code for Split Fiction was provided by the publisher for the purposes of review coverage.
