Split Fiction (PlayStation, Xbox, PC, £39.99)
Verdict: Too good
Unconstrained tech bros stealing people’s best creations and turning them into online AI slop? It could never happen in the real world, could it? Nah, surely not.
So well done to Hazelight for imagining such a dystopia — and setting their latest game in it.
At the start of Split Fiction, two authors have their minds picked for ideas by a dodgy tech company.
One, called Mio, specialises in science fiction. The other, Zoe, writes fantasy.
Together, thanks to the vagaries of technological progress, they are sucked into their imaginary universes. And it’s up to both of them to get out.
And I really do mean both of them. Split Fiction, like much of Hazelight’s previous work, is a cooperative game in which two players must work together, as Mio and Zoe, to advance.
Peter Hoskin: ‘Split Fiction, like much of Hazelight’s previous work, is a cooperative game in which two players must work together, as Mio and Zoe, to advance’
Peter Hoskin: ‘Split Fiction also makes Hazelight’s previous work, including the brilliant It Takes Two, seem like a warm-up for this main event’
This cooperation can be performed shoulder-to-shoulder on your sofa, or it can be done over the internet.
But Split Fiction also makes Hazelight’s previous work, including the brilliant It Takes Two, seem like a warm-up for this main event.
It’s just so ambitious — and not simply because you and your buddy are bouncing between sci-fi and fantasy universes.
Even within each universe, there’s incredible variety. You’ll do 3D platforming, shooting, puzzle-solving, racing and lots, lots more. You’ll even game as, well…sausages.
And, somehow, Split Fiction doesn’t just cohere; it conquers. Mio and Zoe’s story will pull you and your gaming partner through to what is one of the most effective — and affecting — conclusions in years. Turns out, the tech bros have it wrong. Humanity matters.
Peter Hoskin: ‘Split Fiction doesn’t just cohere; it conquers. Mio and Zoe’s story will pull you and your gaming partner through to what is one of the most effective — and affecting — conclusions in years’
Two Point Museum (PlayStation, Xbox, PC, £24.99)
Verdict: Great exhibition
Ah, it’s another Two Point game. Good. The previous, er, two — Two Point Hospital and Two Point Campus — were a total blast.
Here were successors to the classic management games of the 1990s — games such as Theme Park and Sim City — only with better graphics, better mechanics and a much better sense of humour.
Two Point Museum transplants the action to (you’ll have guessed already) a museum. Like its predecessors, it is polished and funny.
Like its predecessors, it has you expanding your operation room by room, item by item, all in the hope of maximising things like customer happiness, scientific progress and the all-important bottom line.
Which makes Museum sound like more of the same. Except that’s not quite right.
Not only does this game benefit from refinements made over years, it’s also more varied than Hospital and even Campus.
This is true of Museum’s exhibits, which range from aquarium fish to alien artefacts, meaning that you’re never stuck with just one dusty type of establishment.
But it’s also true of Museum’s gameplay, which gives your budding museum director more to do.
Two Point Museum is a ‘polished and funny’ game, writes Peter Hoskin
Peter Hoskin: ‘Not only does this game benefit from refinements made over years, it’s also more varied than Hospital and even Campus’
‘I particularly enjoyed the option to send curators off on expeditions to find new exhibits — expeditions from which they might never return’, wrote Peter Hoskin
I particularly enjoyed the option to send curators off on expeditions to find new exhibits — expeditions from which they might never return…
And if they do return?
Sure, Two Point Museum seems to say, they might have taken an artefact from some fictional otherland — but what if that artefact is a frozen caveman who starts smashing stuff up as soon as he thaws?
One way or another, the past always catches up with us.
