Split Fiction

I'm genuinely surprised this game is rated as high as it is. If it was $10-$20 I would maybe understand, but for $50 this is baffling. The two main characters are unlikable. Zoe, the redhead, is naive and sheltered. Mio, the brunette, is mean and has a victim complex. Their very first interaction tells you everything you need to know about them. Zoe says, "Hi! I'm energetic," and Mio says, "Shut up." Enjoy that for the next 10 hours until they start to open up about their personal traumas or whatever. The villain is stupid and his plan makes no sense. The machine steals people's creativity, and there's basically no way to explain what the machine does in any other way, but they're "going public" with the technology soon... so what's the plan? Reveal this creativity-stealing tech to the world and they'll all just line up to give away their ideas to this evil man and his evil corporation? It's short-sighted, uninteresting, and makes no sense. There's no plan. A child's idea of "evil." The gameplay is a total coin flip; either you're solving brain-dead puzzles and/or pressing a single button while the game happens around you like a Disney ride, or you're frustratingly replaying the same sequence over and over and over because it suddenly requires a level of precision or timing from you that leaves you banging your head on the wall--not because it's hard, but because the controls aren't precise enough or the timing is super tight in this otherwise walk-in-the-park game. Also, there's a part of the game where you each get a dragon, and both of the dragon's have wings, but only one of the dragons can fly. The other one can... climb ivy? I cannot fathom how you drop the ball so hard as to give the player a dragon with wings and not let them both fly. A previous section gave both characters jetpacks that could fly around, so why the distinction now? The worlds are uninspired. Both of these characters are "writers" but they're hackneyed and plagued with cliche. Mio's victim complex leaves all of her stories being about fighting "the man" in her cyberpunk sci-fi worlds, most of which are endless grey corridors and grey machinery and grey robots. To be fair, the cyberpunk city part was visually pleasing, but otherwise its grey on grey on grey. Zoe's fantasy worlds are pretty to look at--and aaaaalmost achieve a stylized look that's aaaaalmost interesting--but all she does is tread tired cliche after cliche. First you escape a fantasy town attacked by trolls, then you have to stop an "evil" ice king from covering the world in ice, then you're in harry potter world, then you're saving dragons while a big scary "evil" dragon destroys stuff. And all the while Mio is being a tryhard sadboy jerk about literally everything Zoe says and does, and Zoe is being a sheltered creampuff softbaby about how scary and mean Zoe's attitude and worlds are. I have been playing video games since the late 80's. My partner has been playing games for almost as long. We've been consistently unimpressed at best, or frustrated and not having fun at worst. I work in an elementary school, and one of my 3rd graders played this game with her dad, and spent the better part of two weeks every day telling me about the game and how fun it was. She's part of the reason I gave this game a chance. I'm realizing, as I type this, that you either need to be a very casual gamer or a child to enjoy this game--which is still baffling, because a few sections have been so frustrating to get through that I don't understand how either casuals or children could enjoy them. I understand I'm in the overwhelming minority with my take, but I went into this game with an open mind and high expectations--that student of mine REALLY liked this game. Again, if this was a $10-20 experience, I would be much less critical, but $50!? And an average completion time of 10-15 hours!? Even if the gameplay was awesome and the writing was good, that still wouldn't be a great dollar-to-time ratio. TL;DR -- This game is short, frustrating, and poorly written. The levels aren't engaging, the puzzles are either braindead or frustrating, and the characters all suck, every one of them. Spend your money elsewhere.