I Can’t Even Help You Beat Split Fiction’s Gameshow Side Story

Hey, everybody. What’s your favourite gameshow? Something intellectually stimulating, like The Chase? A more casual, luck based affair like Deal or No Deal? Maybe even one of those gameshows that isn’t really a gameshow so much as a reality show full of people being conniving in the hopes of winning money, like The Traitors. It’s probably not the one where the teammates throw a bomb at each other over and over again until it explodes, like Split Fiction seems to think a gameshow is, right?

Gameshow, the worst side story in all of Split Fiction, ostensibly depicts a gameshow. Except it doesn’t, really. As you’ll have picked up from my description, it involves two contestants throwing a bomb at each other. This is bad for a number of reasons. Firstly, it’s not a gameshow – this isn’t even how the more bizarre ones like Ninja Warrior work. It’s Portal, if it were bombs instead of portals. Secondly, as is the core premise of Split Fiction itself, it’s not a story. This might make sense if the game were called Split Pitch Deck and it was about two wannabe TV producers trying to sell gameshow ideas to network television, but it’s not.

How To Complete Gameshow In Split Fiction – Git Gud?

But let’s leave aside that Gameshow isn’t really a gameshow, and that creating a gameshow is not the job of a wannabe author. It’s still not very good. It’s punishingly difficult (especially as an earlier Side Story that acts as a major difficulty spike), keeps getting harder without getting more inventive or interesting, and is thematically flat as a pretty limp Portal parody. It’s hard, and once you’ve gotten good at it, it’s boring.

While I played Split Fiction before launch, I made notes of all the places I got stuck, and thought about which ones other people were most likely to get stuck on too, and how I could help said people get unstuck. Welcome to the dizzying world of digital publishing. Things like where the apples were hidden in Farmlife or how to defeat bosses made a lot of sense. But even though I failed over and over again, I thought about how I might help someone with Gameshow. And folks, I got nothing.

I could have churned out a cheap guide telling you that the bounce pad throws you up in the air, that you shouldn’t stand in fire, that the big robot that looks like it’s trying to kill you is indeed trying to kill you, but what would be the point? The rules of Gameshow are simple – throw the bomb before it goes off. The way to do that is also simple – don’t do it when you’re standing in fire or blocked by a wall. Execution is much harder, but there’s little to actually be said for that beyond practising it.

At Least It Has A Cool Trophy

I will say, I think it’s expert trolling to have a Trophy/Achievement tied up in acing Gameshow with no explosions. Very few of Split Fiction’s Trophies/Achievements have descriptions that tell you anything at all (if only some hero had explained how to get every Trophy/Achievement in Split Fiction…), but they’re mostly easy enough to get. You might not know what the one whose description just says “Duuuun dun… duuuun dun…” wants you to do, but linked to the name We’re Gonna Need A Bigger Boat and the picture of a shark, it’s pretty obvious you just need to find a shark.

The Gameshow Trophy/Achievement is clear. There’s no messing around. For Cold Potato, you’re told clearly “Complete the Gameshow without the bomb exploding”. This rare clarity suggests Hazelight knew how tough this one was, and I can respect putting in a challenge. Doing it perfectly should be tough, otherwise you’re just going through the motions. But doing it at all feels like a slog, as counterintuitive to its more casual player base as Final Dawn a few chapters later. Gameshow deserves to be cancelled after one disappointing season, never to be seen again.

Released

March 6, 2025

Developer(s)

Hazelight Studios