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Split Fiction review

Fantastic from start to finish, Split Fiction is one of the most inventive and joyful co-op games to date, and a testament to the power of human imagination.

It's a staggering feat of imagination, which - for a game about an evil publishing company using an ominous machine to siphon ideas straight out of writers' brains to regurgitate them into easily marketable virtual reality slop - is a pleasing and emphatic middle finger to the ongoing debate about the threat of AI. It gets so much mileage out of its central conceit of a fantasy writer and sci-fi novelist getting mixed up in virtual simulations of each other's stories, taking us from Dune-like industrial escapes and rainy, cyberpunk highways to shape-shifting forest realms and dragon nests high in the mountains, and plenty more besides, as they try and find a way home. These powers are unique in every level, whether it's operating a pinball machine with one player as a ball and the other on paddle duty, switching gravity plains to perform stomach-lurching perspective tricks, transforming into a piranha-repelling otter to heave a bamboo reed through a watery gauntlet of man-eating plants, adopting a Diablo-esque isometric perspective to belch acid and charge into enemies as two colourful dragons, or even having one player trying to deactivate a self-destruct sequence on a speeding motorbike by means of a ludicrous homage to Google's Captcha tests.

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