Indie horror developer Mike Klubnika is at it again with his latest, split—stylized s.p.l.i.t—a cerebral and tense game where you do a bunch of pure terminal input hacking to accomplish… something… with your remote black-hat collaborators.
The thing you’re hacking, however, is anything but normal. It’s some kind of terrible electronic… network… thing. The description calls it “an unethical superstructure” but after puzzling about with the information you learn in game I’m going to say that “unethical” is just the barest tip of the nomenclature iceberg you’d use to describe it.
It’s a classic first-person, diegetic game: Which is to say that you use your computer terminals in the game world to chat, investigate the hacking target, and input command prompt routines in order to figure out the (short, fairly simple) hacking puzzles.
The other draw is definitely the chatbox, where you collaborate with your mysterious co-conspirators. Trying to puzzle out who they are and what they’re doing, and if you should hold up your end of the bargain, and if what you’re hacking should even be hacked, is part of the joy of playing split.
If you’re worried about the hacking, for the record, it’s not super hard or too detailed. In fact, it’s pretty short stuff and all the information you need to succeed is contained inside the game’s manuals and dialogues.
You can find s.p.l.i.t on Steam. There are several endings, none of them good.
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