Space Without Story

This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #187. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.

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What does digital grass feel like?

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Split Fiction is the worst written game I have played this year. It is also the game that got me back on board with the medium.

Split Fiction is a co-op platformer in which you and a friend each play as one of two novel writers who are trapped in their own books. Except that neither Mio nor Zoe seem to know what a book is. Zoe, in particular, constantly questions why Mio would put certain elements in her storytelling – elements like basic conflict. They both talk like the worst Joss Whedon characters, and they both talk constantly. Every single line of dialogue is grating, groan-worthy or just incredibly funny in how bad it is.

But Split Fiction is a really, really good videogame.

Every year I get more critical of games as a whole. I find myself disagreeing with the consensus over and over again. I didn’t like Avowed. I didn’t like Tears of the Kingdom. I didn’t like Baldur’s Gate 3. My friend, fellow critic, and Split Fiction partner Diego Argüello once called me “the blockbuster hater,” a name that I wear with great pride.

Usually what I struggle with in games is the stories. What frustrated me about Avowed was that, at times, it could be specific and unique, before the yoke of being a videogame yanked it back into boring clichés. What frustrated me about Tears of the Kingdom was that its story was built on the same backbone of sexism and racism that the Zelda series has always skated by on without much criticism, and it doubled down on its restoration fantasy. What frustrated me about Baldur’s Gate 3 wasn’t the story itself, but the fact that it was buried under mechanics that I just don’t really enjoy, which isn’t at all a sin of the game, but isn’t exactly a problem you get in books.

And often, when we talk about games that are good, myself included, we talk about ways the medium allows it to tell a story that can’t be told some other way. Outer Wilds is the classic example: the sense of discovery is a crucial part of the experience that ties together the player’s and the protagonist’s experience. Blue Prince is a recent good pick, but it also shows another struggle games have. You couldn’t tell that story any other way than as a roguelike-draftbuilder blend, and it is very good for that reason, but still, the randomness makes it drag in places.

Split Fiction is different. The story is not made good by its medium. Its story is in fact barely connected to how it actually plays minute-to-minute. Mio and Zoe double jump and grapple hook through levels, solve very basic cooperative puzzles and fight multistage bosses. My constant running commentary during play is “imagine reading a description of what is happening right now.” Paragraphs on paragraphs of “Mio leapt across the gap, then the next gap, then dashed and sprinted to a blue circle which she could shoot but Zoe couldn’t. This raised a platform so that Zoe could cross. Then Zoe had to shoot a pink triangle to open the way through.” None of it would work as a novel, despite the fact that the two main characters are ostensibly supposed to be moving through one. But it’s also simply not an interesting story on its own.

But it is, and this is really the only way I can say this, incredibly fun. Another thing you don’t get in a novel is you and a friend both enthusiastically, unhesitatingly and simultaneously making an ill-advised leap into unexplained bright green acid and instantly vaporizing yourselves. You don’t get to fuck around leaving targeted messages for one another. You don’t get to just not try very hard in a boss battle because it doesn’t matter if you die, you just get to rely on your friend.

Everything that’s good about Split Fiction is good because it’s a videogame. And that’s not because it helps to tell the story they want to tell. It’s because . . . videogames . . . can be good? Messing around in a space with a good buddy is hardwired into the human brain and it doesn’t matter whether or not that space is digital. But when it is digital, you can put a whole bunch of toys in there that are just joyful.

And you’re telling me they’re making a movie of it?!

I’m sure the writing in the movie won’t be quite as bad as the writing in the game. But what does it matter? Split Fiction is a playground held on a server somewhere and beamed between two homes, one in Buenos Aires and one in Sheffield. You can’t put that on a silver screen.

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Jay Castello is a freelance writer covering games and internet culture. If they’re not down a research rabbit hole you’ll probably find them taking bad photographs in the woods.