Video game auteur’s latest two-player tale is another bizarre hit

For people who are supposed to be writers, the protagonists seem exclusively to create the most generic and hamfisted genre narratives, with awful cliched dialogue and basically no subtext or deeper meaning. An early sci-fi section features a killer parking robot, in a story inspired by the time Mio got a parking ticket, and that’s about the standard you can expect throughout. At a meta level there is a more successful commentary on creative industry, with a publisher literally siphoning the magic out of earnest creators, but it’s similarly literal.

Thankfully the game-play ideas are much more imaginative and varied, to the point that I legitimately find it shocking that such genius and such mundanity can live together in the same experience. One sci-fi motorcycle getaway sequence features a swift procession of different driving and shooting sections, including one where Zoe needs to use a smartphone (trying to unlock it, solving visual CAPTCHA puzzles to prove she’s a human), while Mio keeps them from dying by manoeuvring through a cyber highway. It’s brief but hilarious, with each player needing to focus but also struggling not to pay attention to the wild things the other is doing.

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Split Fiction is not the first video game to feature brilliant game-play and a weak story. In fact, you could argue that the majority of them do. It’s the brazen choice to focus so much of the experience on storytelling here that really accentuates it. Still, if you and your regular movie night partner are the kind of people who can laugh at schlocky dialogue and outrageously daft plots, the surprise and excitement of the game-play here carries the experience to make it one of the great modern two-player experiences.

It’s also worth noting that the intimate two-player premise of the game is refreshing in and of itself, especially coming from publisher EA, which tends towards the live service and microtransaction side of things. It’s nice to play a finite game with a close friend, and as with It Takes Two you can even play with a distant pal over the internet, with only one of you needing to have purchased the game.