Sheaf Street, Leeds · since 2021
Split Screen started as a disagreement in a pub near the station. Two of us had finished the same strategy game that month and could not work out how we had come away with opposite readings of the same campaign. Neither of us had been wrong about the facts. We had simply valued different things, and no review either of us had read acknowledged that this was possible.
Five years on there are four of us and six possible pairings, which is exactly enough to keep the write-ups from settling into a house style. We share a small studio room in Leeds, three afternoons a week, and the rest happens on our own machines at home.
Nobody here does this full time. That limits what we can cover and, we think, improves what we do cover.
The four
Each of us plays roughly one game a month for the site. The tags underneath show which pairings tend to produce the sharpest splits.
Nadia Okonkwo
Tactics, builders, long campaigns
Came to games writing from ten years as a logistics planner, which shows in the columns: she wants to know what a system is optimising for and gets restless when the answer is nothing in particular. Has the highest completion rate at the desk and the least patience for a tutorial that lies.
Handles the queue and the version-lock notes, mostly because nobody else will keep a spreadsheet honest.
Callum Fraser
Shooters, level design, difficulty
Trained as an architect and never quite stopped thinking in floor plans. Writes about sightlines, chokepoints and how a corridor teaches you to move through it. Will happily abandon a game at hour twenty-five and explain precisely which decision lost him, which makes his columns unusually easy to disagree with.
Keeps the record of which builds we played, and is the reason the hardware note exists at the foot of every entry.
Priya Raman
Puzzles, co-op, accessibility options
Works in secondary education and reads every game as a teaching document: what does it explain, what does it withhold, and who does it quietly exclude. She is the reason our write-ups always mention subtitle handling, remapping and colour options, even when the rest of the column is negative.
Least tolerant of the phrase “it clicks eventually”, and generally right about that.
Marcus Ade
Role-playing, management sims, tables
Spent years running tabletop campaigns and treats a spreadsheet screen as legitimate play. Will simulate an entire season without watching a match and write four hundred words on why that was the correct way to hold the game. Responsible for both of this year’s stalemates, and unrepentant.
Also does the copy-editing, which means every column on this site has been through the hands of someone who disagreed with part of it.
Pairings
The first fourteen write-ups were nearly all consensus verdicts. That was not agreement. It was habit.
Nadia and Callum wrote almost everything in the first year because they had the most time. By the tenth pair their columns were finishing each other’s arguments. We were still writing separately, but we were also having lunch together five days a week and talking about the game the whole time.
A reader wrote in to say the two columns read like one person arguing with themselves for balance. That was fair, and it stung enough to change the process.
Pairings now rotate so that no two people write more than three consecutive pairs together. Drafts go into a locked folder until both are filed. And wherever the game allows it, one of the two players is unfamiliar with the genre, because unfamiliarity surfaces assumptions that expertise hides.
Split verdicts became the most common outcome within four months, and have stayed that way since. We take that as the process working rather than as the desk falling out.
Independence
Split Screen is funded out of four people’s pockets and a small annual contribution from a local independent bookshop that shares the studio building with us. That contribution covers the hosting and the studio room, nothing else. It buys no editorial influence and the bookshop has never asked for any.
We accept review copies of games and always say so at the foot of the relevant entry. We do not accept paid placements, sponsored posts, affiliate arrangements or anything that ties a link to a commercial outcome. There is no advertising anywhere on this site, and there are no third-party scripts loaded on any page, which you can verify by looking at what your browser requests.
Nobody here draws an income from the site. All four of us have other jobs, and that is why we publish two or three pairs a month rather than something every day.
Practicalities
The fastest route is the form on the talk back page. It runs entirely in your browser and does not send anything anywhere, so for anything you actually need us to read, email is the reliable option: [email protected].
We read everything and answer most things within a fortnight. Corrections jump the queue. Requests for us to remove a negative column do not.
