A World of Madness - Akira Yamaoka (From the 'Silent Hill 2' Soundtrack)
wow finally finished!! this was the last of the games I played for my 12 games of christmas challenge 2025. I'm actually writing this in feb 2026 because i was putting it off and i got sick but i'm finished now!! (still sick though) This game is actually really hopeless and depressing and evil but it's pretty cool! I don't have a tonne to say about it so this is prob gonna be rlly short
s.p.l.i.t is a pseudo-puzzle game that places you in the shoes of a software engineer of some kind hacking into an old device used to torture prisoners in a digital hell for eternity. There's a constant looming threat of being discovered for this act and getting put in the prison yourself, which creates a real sense of dread throughout the entire thing. There's like 4 different things you can look at through the entire game and one of them is the window behind you which I thought was a really nice touch that reaffirmed this feeling really well. I was checking that shit every 5 seconds!! From the beginning theres a constant implication that there's no avoiding getting found out for what you're doing and you're gonna have to kill yourself at the end (sucks). Really a hopeless and bleak atmosphere throughout the whole thing. Not a bad thing though!
The gameplay segments are where this game really stood out for me - you're literally just navigating an ancient cmd terminal and going through directories trying to find different files. It's a super interesting concept that really grounds you in the universe and makes the task feel super real. I've never played anything like it before and there's no hand holding at all, which never actually ended up being a problem for me. I've played games that simulate the feeling of using a virtual device within the game before but never anything as technically accurate as this. You have to learn the prompts for this specific OS and use them to navigate around, it's really neat. I would play a fully fleshed out game like this for sure. When it finished I was kind of sad because it's so short!!
I don't really have anything else to say since I played it 2 months ago and it's like an hour long but I enjoyed it!!
