Split Personalities

Split Personalities is a 1986 ZX Spectrum puzzle game, and one of those that take a thoroughly familiar principle and twist it into something of their own. The base is the sliding puzzle, the plastic one with numbered tiles that lived in everyone's kitchen drawer. Here you use it to assemble the portrait of a famous person, and the gallery runs to Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Princess Diana and Sir Clive Sinclair, which on a Spectrum game is a joke in itself.

The important change from the toy is the arithmetic: sixteen pieces spread over twenty spaces. Those four empty squares change everything. You are not locked into a single possible sequence of moves, you can manoeuvre, and above all you can work fast. The pieces do not appear on the board by themselves either. You steer a spinning cursor onto a square and press, the piece appears, and you shift it by holding the button and pushing a direction.

On top of that sits the layer that makes the game work. Alongside the fragments of the picture, bonus objects turn up that can be paired by meaning, a bullet with a gun and so on, and a correct pairing pays out. Because the clock is running throughout, you constantly have to choose between chasing a bonus and getting on with the face. That pressure turns Split Personalities into a brisk action game rather than a contemplative puzzle, and it is the best thing about it.

The weakness is how quickly you learn everything. Ten pictures is not many, and once you work out the fastest way to get pieces where they belong the game becomes a score chase. For short sessions it remains excellent, and the plain, legible graphics help it along.

On oldgame.cz it runs directly in the browser, with no installation.