31st May
Hello and welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we’ve been playing. This week Bertie has mixed feelings about Split Fiction, Ed discovers he really likes Elden Ring Nightreign but wants more from it after the campaign, and Donlan appreciates a game unfolding before him.
What have you been playing?
Catch up with the older editions of this column in our What We’ve Been Playing archive.
Split Fiction, PS5
I’ve been eager to try this for a while. I was fond of It Takes Two and the reception around Split Fiction has been enormously enthusiastic. Also, I love that there’s a studio like Hazelight dedicating itself to making co-op games – not just games that can be played in co-op but games that require it. It’s weird that it should be an unusual thing these days, but it is and I’m totally here for it.
I like it – I like the game. In parts, I love it, and I think I’d expected this reaction more.
The parts I love: its fluidity. This is a colder, technical thing to praise, but it makes the game so invitingly touchable and toylike because of the way it responds and moves. Big tick. Two: the set-up for the game works superbly in that having two writers’ stolen stories to choose from, Hazelight gives itself a potentially bottomless source of ideas to hop between without lingering in one for too long. It’s perfectly fine for one world to contain only one idea, which many of them do. And who doesn’t want to play on a level where you surf around on a sand shark?