Recent reviews by Baum

Being able to purchase this game for 3 € is absolutely insane. I can't imagine a better bang for your buck ratio. If you haven't for some reason, buy this and be amazed. One of the all time greatest and one of my personal fabvorite games of all time!

This really is not that great a game to me and it's truly confusing how much people are praising it. It's not bad but how can anyone consider this GOTY?

Let me elaborate, some spoilers might be ahead especially under Story.


1. World
The world and levels feel uninspired and uncomfortable to me. It looks pretty on screenshots (not so much in-game actually) but that's about it. I am tired of these levels that seem surreal just for the sake of it. There is very little detail to any level, little to explore visually. Everything floats, there is absurd architecture everywhere and it gets tiresome. The world (apart from the starting location Lumiere) feels uninspired. It's your typical surreal fantasy world - but that alone does not make it visually appealing or interesting to explore. The world does not feel like a lot of thought or concept design was put into it. It's very generic within the setting and I was getting tired of it pretty much immediately once I discovered there is no deeper design philosophy behind it or more complex visual world-building.

6/10 for me.

2. Overall Visuals
The graphics are ok. Had this game been released in 2017 I wouldn't have been impressed back then either. That does not mean it's terrible looking, but the textures are not very impressive and especially the faces don't look very good.

I know this is from a smaller team though, so 7/10.

3. Combat
This is the first real JRPG I've played at least for a while, maybe the first one I've played at all. I am an open-minded player though, I like games from pretty much every genre. The combat in this one did not impress me, though. It's certainly not bad, but gets stale after a while. It's the only gameplay you'll get in this game as well, there's nothing else really other than walking around the levels. The gameplay loop becomes repetitive quickly and having to sit through the same, sometimes lengthy animations of both your characters and the enemies becomes quite boring, quite quickly. It did not hook me at all gameplay wise, but I realize that this is very personal. It's technically not bad and you can create some decent builds, although they feel rather limited because your characters already have specific gameplay styles intended for them.

The dodging and parrying, which is not typical for JRPGs from what I've gathered, is a nice addition, though. 6/10 for me.

4. Story
The Story is what got me to purchase the game initially. The core idea is very unique and interesting. The people live in a city, every year the paintress paints a number and all the people whose age this number corresponds to die the next year. The people of this world send out expeditions to uncover the secrets of the paintress and try to save themselves. A battle against time and an ominous villain, a people who face demise and need to find a way to survive.

This opens up very interesting philosophical discussions about how valuable time is, whether to bring children into a dying world and when to even have children to allow them to have the fullest life they can. I was very intrigued and the prologue is incredible at capturing some of these ideas. I was really looking forward to figuring out what the paintress is and why she does what she does.

Unforutnately, this incredible story pretty much gets dropped after the prologue. I am not kidding, the devs decided to quit their amazing ideas once you enter the first act. Pretty much nothing happens anymore until the last act, only vague visions of some characters and ominous hints that are difficult to interpret. Some things you could figure out before they were eventually revealed, but the game failed to keep me interested after a short while, because really barely anything was happening story-wise until the very end. I was disappointed already by how little they decided to do with the story and the characters, but the final reveal or 'twist' actually blew my mind by how bad it was. Keep in mind the story did not move forward pretty much at all until they revealed the 'twist'.

Spoilers ahead.

They decided to fully abort the people we cared about (or were supposed to care about) and make the story about a family's trauma. The world, the stakes of it, the characters - they're all fake. Painted by a grieving family. A family we know little about and care about even less. Because why would we? We set out to save the people of Lumiere and now the devs expect us to care about a family we don´t know. I only pushed through the game to finally unveil the mystery about Lumiere and why its people have to die. And the explanation is they are 'painted' by a family to deal with their grief. All the stakes, all the mystery - gone. Why was this necessary? The reveal was incredibly disappointing, it's actually incomprehensible to me.

Now I thought this could at least lead to other interesting ideas to explore - the characters (who live independent lives and seem like actual people) learn that their world is fake - that they are not real. What is reality, what's the importance of artificial, of 'painted' life? These questions are not explored. Like at all, at least not in the main story. The story is on pause for a good portion of the game - the 'twist' is sudden and dissappointing and it overall feels rushed, therefore. Why does the game not take its time to explore the ramifications of these events? Why would I care about this family, why did they not write the story around Lumiere and its characters and people, their core idea was incredibly complex and deep and would have made for a great story.

In the end, because of the events, I just didn't care about the story anymore at all. The characters are decent, but even there they left out a lot that could have been explored about the unique situation they live in. The events of the story and especially its 'twist' should have massive consequences for the characters and their personalities, but this simply isn't explored sufficiently in my opinion.

The intitial story is still excellent - but its ultimate execution and the twist especially are bad, very bad. 5/10 for me.

5. Conclusion
Act 3 undermines the, intially great and after Act 2 decent, story fundamentally and hurts the plot very much. The world feels uninspired and the combat gets boring quickly. I realize the critique I have on the combat is personal, the flaws the story has are profound, however, and because of them, the entire experience felt meaningless and boring to me. I give this a 6/10 overall.

Edit: I will appreciate the effort the team put in. I can still see the creative vision for the game and I am thankful that, in an age of a industry that's greedier than ever, small studios like this can find success and release a product that appeals to many people. The pricing of 45 € for an experience like this is also much appreciated and fair.

Despite my issues with the game, I am still looking forward to what the studio comes up with next and I cannot emphazise enough how important this game is for the industry overall.

So this is a good game. The reviews are not lying. It does not deserve the overwhelmingly positive reviews, however.

And that is mostly due to the fact that it is the successor to probably the best coop game of this kind, It Takes Two.
Split Fiction just pales in comparison.

The gameplay is less varied. I remember in It Takes Two you would sometimes switch gameplay styles three or four times within a single level. Split Fiction's gameplay just never feels that fresh or unique. You do a lot of the same stuff a lot of the time and it does not feel as cooperative as It Takes Two did.

What annoys me the most, though, are the levels. It Takes Two had fantastically unique and beautifully designed levels that allowed for a lot of discovery and sense of sensation. Split Fiction's levels are mostly boring and uninspired. Most notably the SciFi parts of the game just consist of a variety of slightly different looking grey and brown factories. Very dull to look at and almost unpleasant to play through. The Fantasy levels are more interesting to look at (at least there's some color) but don't have anything noteworthy to explore or see either.

It Takes Two had NPCs in its levels that you could kind of interact with, it had simple activities within the level that you could partake in. Split Fiction doesn't really have that. While playing It Takes Two, I was always excited to discover a new area of a level, because there was always something to see, something to do. Split Fiction fails quite badly in that regard. It simply does not reward you for looking around the level, mostly because there just isn't something to see. This is not some minor criticism, it is part of what made It Takes Two great for me. Especially Split Fiction's SciFi levels, I just want to be done with for the most part, they are that boring to play.

Granted, It Takes Two's setting itself probably allowed for more of creativity and variety in terms of gameplay and level design. But come on, Scifi and Fantasy realistically should do that, too. I feel like the devs just didn't put as much effort and love into SplitFiction as they did before, and it shows. This is by no means a bad game, and I still enjoy playing it, but Hazelight could do so much better.

The last time I played was back in march, now, almost 9 months later, the game still feels very much the same. For a coop game to stay relevant and replayable, you got to have fresh content frequently. There is like 3 new strategems and the regular battlepasses which isn't going to cut it. We need new content and ways to play the game to keep it fresh.

This game doesn't force pronouns upon you, so you should buy it just for that.

I don't understand the overwhelmingly positive reviews. This game does not deserve a thumbs down either, but that's just the way it is on Steam.

The game becomes far too tedious, far too quickly. I went into this seeking a casual game to relax, and initially it is exactly that. But the game introduces way too many mechanics and quite honestly feels too long. I've played for almost 11 hours and it seems I am nowhere near done. After a certain point it really felt boring and more like work to manage all the different systems.

It overstays its welcome a bit and while I don't think it's a bad game at all, I just got tired of it and couldn't push through. Unfortunate, because I believe a more focused experienced would have vastly improved the game.

Setting CA's scummy policies aside, this is an amazing game. It really is the ultimate Total War experience. It's so full of content it's actually insane. No, it wasn't great at launch and the main campaign still kinda sucks but Immortal Empires offers content for hundreds of hours. I only want to rate the game here and its one of the best strategy games on the market for sure. Yes, the DLC are pricey (especially the new ones) but I would recommend picking up one or two per sale as you get familiar with the game and just buy whatever looks fun, because it usually is. Keep in mind you actually only need very few DLC and you can freely expand whatever faction you like with additional content.

I'm only writing this review to get the game more popular and thereby hopefully getting the devs to make another one. There aren't many games out there that truly focus on cooperative play and this is one of them. Had great fun solving the puzzles and mysteries with my buddy

I honestly just want a standalone card game of the game you play in the cabin. Really a lot of fun, that. Reminds me of Gwent in The Witcher

I can say with great certainty that the real horror isn't what you'll find in the mines but the terrible callouts your friends make that lead you directly to a 20 foot monster instead of a safe exit lmao