You don’t use the mouse in S.p.l.i.t, but you won’t miss it. Games are sometimes described as ‘clunky’, but what’s more satisfying than good clunk? Each key clank here hits like a heart thud. Axel and two associates are scrambling for root access to launch a malware attack on “the facility” – as in “death is the least of my worries. Being dragged into the facility is what scares me”.
S.p.l.i.t is about an hour long and describes its own dingy skeuomorphism as a “diegetic & immersive UI” and it is that, except when it’s alienating; esoteric; repellent. The game starts and I enter the group chat as Axel. A flashing line prompts me to speak but it doesn’t matter what keys I press, Axel types what he wants. Inhabit. Dissociate. It feels like having an out of body experience with a body that doesn’t belong to me in the first place. There is an unnervingly subtle lag to it all. Axel feels exactly one key slower than me.
Watch on YouTube
But then it’s go time, and I am at slower than him at everything else. I imagine Axel’s machines as extensions of himself as he scours directories and solves problems with a practised incisiveness. My fingers are clumsy and my mind is already sore from wrangling rebellious machine spirits that spit and scoff in obtuse sepia cuniform.
But when Axel’s nervous thoughts get out of control, I’m the one scrubbing out floating words of doubt with some absolutely furious clacking. Looks like we need each other here, buddy.
Pantone 448 C is a miserable, sickly hue of brown that has been described as the world’s ugliest colour. Variants of it are the colour of cigarette packs in the UK, as well as parts of Europe and several other countries. I mention it because there’s a pack under Axel’s desk, and also because every colour in S.p.l.i.t seems to be derived from it in some form. This is probably some sort of synesthesia through suggestion on my part, but there are other suggestions besides the cig pack. It is a miserable, sickly place, this room.
The chat keeps me updated on the next steps, the stakes, the view from inside the facility. It feels exciting. Dangerous. The computer interface offers uncharacteristically gentle guidance that perhaps goes too far in reminding me I’m playing a videogame. It tells me when I’ve tried to open a directory using an open file command and gives me the right one. It clarifies the format it wants some inputs in – designerly cushioned edges. But between the cortisol-spattered techno snares and rushed expletives in chat, the peril is convincing enough to stick. S.p.l.i.t is good at making you feel very clever and utterly out of your depth from one deceptively simple task to the next.
(Crossing the gulf between what can you do now and what you hope to be able to do some day is how you hone a craft. Looking at what you’ve made and feeling despair is how you know you’re getting better. But, if you ever make the heinous, unforgivably self-serious mistake of beginning to identity with the craft, the despair can feel like an assault on your entire sense of self. It is recommended to avoid this if at all possible, but does the world really need more of anything someone didn’t identify with in their shivering, searing totality?)
I hunt for different scraps of information to piece together. I can print notes to keep track of number strings. Server IDs. Access keys. I am playing as the part of Axel’s brain where he keeps the thing he is best at and I am atrophying but the rest of him doesn’t seem to have realised yet, so he keeps promising to do cool and dangerous hacker shit in the chat, then turns to his second monitor and waits and watches patiently as brain-me batters in typos and unrecongisable commands.
A rich and terrifying setting is hinted at in tiny, fearful glimpses. Cartoon lightbulbs flicker on and dim and light up again, above a head I keep moving slightly closer to the screen, sitting up, edging toward it without noticing. There is a real joy in realising what the game wants, understanding how to do it, then executing it. There is an undercurrent of diseased martyrdom to all of this. Axel makes fallback plans that suggest the reach of The Facility is far greater than I’d realised. Damn, that’s horrific, I think. Wild. You don’t use ‘A’ and ‘D’ to ‘look’ in S.p.l.i.t, you “pivot your cervical spine”.
(The real promise of craft might not be self-expression at all but self-confirmation. Some of us are granted less body autonomy than others but the real amount of body autonomy most us have is close to zero. I am a 6’1″, 224 pound man and people who are stronger and more numerous than me can decide to take ownership of my body whenever they choose. I probably have some legal recourse over this but many don’t. Many of us may no longer have it in the future. But, like Axel, I have at least learned to make my fingers make strange symbols do the things I want. There is a corporeal power in this if nothing else.)
Art is sometimes what it makes you think about so all that shit in brackets is basically my review here. You probably won’t think about the exact same thing while playing this, but I imagine the concept of despair will likely be a component. S.p.l.i.t isn’t as graphic or harrowing as a Martyrs or even a I Have No Mouth, partly because it’s short and uses that constraint well by suggesting a richly nasty setting with few lines of text and a slack handful of images. Partly because a dash of Buckshot Roulette’s sardonic chuckling takes the edge off. Mostly I think because Axel isn’t really a person. He’s got too much of me inside him at this point, and I am sitting at safe distance.
Except… my notes at this point in the game – my personal notes – read: AND THEN IT FUCKING HAPPENS. They read “no no no” and they read “can’t I do something else”. And then it ends. At this point, I know there are two endings and that I’ve just seen the second, because there are two hidden Steam achievements and I got the one that says “ending two”. I’m getting better at this hacker shit already. Let’s try for ending one, then.
I know what I’m doing more this time. The distance between me and Axel is less vast. I type and search with confidence, if not full competence. I still wish the chat typing was faster. Conversations take on a different meaning. I go deeper into files this time. I read more. I learn more. Horrors I’d only imagined have names now. I reach ending two and only partially wish I hadn’t.
Sometimes working out how you feel about something is best done by imagining how you’ll talk about it in the future if someone mentions it. “Oh yeah, S.p.l.i.t! Fucked up, that one,” I’ll say. “Play it for sure, though”. I’ll say that because there’s more than despair here. There’s an ailing sort of triumph, too.